One Song at a Time: "Oliver's Army"

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, circa 1979

The song: "Oliver's Army"

Artist: Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Released: 1979

Typical "Zomby" panel.

This is a pilot of sorts for a potential series. I guess whether it continues depends on what readers think of it and how much I enjoy writing it. Honestly, I feel guilty when too much time builds up between posts. To counteract this, I wanted to come up with something I could write quickly, without a great deal of research or preparation, so that I could have new content here every day or two.

In the past, that function was filled by Zomby, since originally all I had to do to turn Ziggy into a zombie was cut and paste him into Microsoft Paint, select the default shade of light grey from the color palette, and then click on the title character. Bingo! Instant hilarity! Then, the site that provided the black-and-white Ziggy panels I needed started posting grainier, lower-quality scans of the cartoons. Suddenly, I had to manually, painstakingly "paint" Ziggy the proper shade of grey to make him undead. Bogus! Besides, I'd already cycled through most of the potential punchlines with Zomby and wound up doing variations on variations by the end.

So what else could I do on the fly? Well, my iTunes library currently has 17,372 songs in it, so maybe there's some potential material there. Here's the plan for Best Songs Ever: I'll pick one particular track from those 17,372 songs and write a few paragraphs about why I like this song so much. This will be half music criticism and half autobiography, since I'll inevitably wind up writing about how these songs have affected my life. Does that sound good? If so, let's continue.

The Armed Forces LP.

"Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions is a song that must have come to my attention about twenty-five years ago, when I was a terminally-confused teenage weirdo who didn't know anything about anything but thought he knew a great deal about a great deal. Costello's then-recent Spike album, featuring the hit single "Veronica" (a collaboration with Paul McCartney) was a big crossover hit in 1989, the very year I entered high school, and that was probably my gateway into his discography.

I'd seen Costello before that, but I hadn't really paid that much attention. Seeking more, I consulted the encyclopedic Rolling Stone Album Guide for some much-needed album guidance, and that led me to Armed Forces, a 1979 LP Costello recorded with his sometimes-backing band, the Attractions. Rolling Stone didn't steer me wrong, either: Armed Forces is an excellent concept album with a consistent warfare motif, often using militaristic imagery to describe romantic relationships. The songs on the album are propulsive and punchy, with sharp, sardonic lyrics and catchy, indelible melodies.

One track that stuck out from my very first listen was "Oliver's Army," which was actually a big hit over in England, hitting #2 on the singles chart and going gold. Considering the prickly, political lyrics, that's kind of a mind-bender.

The song, not remotely romantic in nature, addresses the issue of England sending its poor, disadvantaged young men (Costello has described them as "mere boys") to fight and die in a variety of foreign hot spots. The "Oliver" of the title is likely Oliver Cromwell, the one-time "Lord Protector" of England, who seized control of the country from reigning monarch King Charles I in a bloody takeover in the mid-1600s. Cromwell's so-called New Model Army, with which he waged civil war in his homeland, is considered the historical forerunner of the modern British military.

The central thesis of Costello's song is that the British government is coldly sending citizens it considers expendable to do its dirty work abroad, a theme encapsulated by this shocking, unsparing couplet: "Only takes one itchy trigger/One more widow, one less white nigger."

How did a song this bleak become a big radio hit? Easy. It's a work of supreme, danceable pop craftsmanship, including a florid piano part Costello admits was swiped directly from ABBA's "Dancing Queen." Listening to "Oliver's Army" on repeat today, I realized how heavily Costello's song shows the influence of Phil Spector's operatic "Wall of Sound" pop and R&B hits of the 1960s. Towards the end of "Oliver's Army," Costello even starts doing the woah oh oh ohs from seemingly every Ronnettes record.

To be honest, when I was 14, I had no idea who Oliver Cromwell was, and I probably couldn't have located most of the places Costello names in the song (Johannesburg, Checkpoint Charlie, etc.) on a map. But any kid sitting through a dull day of high school can relate to this repeated line from the chorus: "And I would rather be anywhere else but here today!"

Okay, folks, that was the pilot. Let me know if you have any interest in seeing this kind of thing on a semi-regular basis.

Were any of your ancestors famous? KEEP READING TO FIND OUT!

History clearly favors grouchy men with facial hair, as shown by this photo collage.

Are there famous people in your family? Does your bloodline include kings, conquerors, explorers, or movie stars? Are you descended from an important historical figure? The surprising answer is below!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 42: 'I Woke Up Early the Day I Died' (1998)

To be Ed-Wood-ically accurate, it should be "shocking facts," not "shocking truth,' but whatever.

"I used to do things, and I'd say things, and Jesus I was evil. Fake things and break things, and Jesus I was evil."

-Darcy Clay (1972-1998)

"One thing he did take was one of the last scripts he wrote, one he really loved, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. And this one angora sweater that he loved so much."

-Kathy Wood (1922-2006)

Tony Bennett's Steppin' Out LP

A funny thing happened in the 1990s, and it was inarguably a boon to the Ed Wood cult. At the height of the "college rock" revolution, many young Americans grew weary of grunge and flannel shirts and started looking to their parents and grandparents for inspiration as they sought an alternative to the alternative. Gone were the scruffy bangs, ripped jeans, and stained baby-doll dresses. People started combing their hair, wearing suits, and drinking martinis again. Hipsters were still raiding the second-hand stores, but now it was to find vintage fedoras and old Les Baxter, Yma Sumac, and Henry Mancini LPs. 

Every cultural movement needs an anthem, and in this case it was Tony Bennett's 1993 remake of the Fred Astaire song "Steppin' Out with My Baby," a tune Bennett reprised the next year on MTV Unplugged. It was a golden age for CD reissues, too, with a whole rainbow of rediscovered non-rock recordings from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s. Suddenly, your music collection wasn't complete without some "grownup" stuff: lounge, exotica, big band, swing, and even film scores.

Old TV shows and movies benefited from the backwards-looking trend, too. Witness director Spike Jonze's wildly popular videos for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" (both from 1994). The former used clips from the TV sitcom Happy Days, thereby invoking both the 1950s and the 1970s simultaneously, while the latter fondly parodied such campy 1970s cop shows as Starsky and Hutch and Baretta. It's important to note that our relationship to mid-20th-century culture was neither entirely worshipful nor entirely sarcastic in the 1990s. It was a mélange. We thought the past was campy and quaint, sure, but we couldn't help but daydream ourselves into a version of America that seemed somehow cooler and classier than the one we knew.

A '90s artifact: the Orgy soundtrack.

Ed Wood was right in the pop cultural sweet spot for all this, so it's not surprising that the second big wave of interest in his career -- following his bump in popularity after The Golden Turkey Awards and It Came from Hollywood in the early 1980s -- would occur during the Clinton years. Edward D.Wood, Jr.'s lifestyle was totally out of step with the 1990s, which paradoxically made him perfect for that decade. Eddie was the Anti-Slacker, the Non-Cobain: a terminally-sincere, whiskey-swilling, pencil-mustached, drug-hating, stuck-in-the-'50s dynamo whose B-movies and cheapo paperbacks clearly reflected the morals and aesthetics of a bygone era.

Perhaps the bohemians of the '90s recognized in Ed Wood a kindred spirit. To the extent that his producers and publishers would allow him, he did it his way. And the many technical and logical shortcomings of his films and books gave these works a personal, homemade feel and distinguished them from the anonymous, assembly-line output of his cinematic and literary contemporaries. Ed may not have been "good" by conventional standards, but he was "different" -- which in the 1990s was maybe even better than "good," at least to a certain segment of the population.

Some of these folks, luckily, were tastemakers with industry connections, and we have them to thank for reissuing some of Ed Wood's films, books, and even music, along with the release of new Wood-inspired works. I'm grateful, for instance, that a tiny independent label called Strangelove Records decided to put out an Orgy of the Dead soundtrack CD in 1995. I doubt that such a release, which I happened to find at the late and much-missed Crow's Nest record store in Crest Hill, IL, would have been feasible at any other time in American history. You could do that kind of stuff back then! As I've made my way through the Ed Wood Wednesdays project, I've come to realize how much I owe to the so-called "lounge revival" of the Nineties.

This week, I am turning my attention to another product from that strange and wondrous decade. It's a full-length, all-star film based on a genuine Ed Wood script. It's quite possible you've never seen or even heard of this flick. And thereby hangs a tale...

I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED (1998)

A catchy title?

Alternate titles: Good golly, does this thing have alternate titles! It began life as a script called The Silent Night or Night of Silence. A later draft of the script was titled I Awoke Early the Day I Died or I Woke Up Early --- The Morning I Died. Additionally, the IMDb lists I Awoke Early the Day I Died as an alternate release title for the finished film*.

It was also marketed as Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. On Brazilian television, it was The Last Day of My Life. Spain had it as I Woke Up Early the Day of My Death. The Hungarian title translates as I Got Up Early the Day I Died. The Venezuelans called it The Last Day of My Life. In Poland, it was known as On the Day of My Death, I Woke Up Early. For German TV, it became Ed Wood's The Day I Died.

The IMDb lists a Japanese title for it, but the best translation I can come up with for it is The Up Early Old Old Man Nuts, which, though hilarious, is probably not accurate. Amazingly, the original promotional web site for the film is still up after 15 years. Move over, Space Jam.

* Not to be confused with David Tahir's I Awoke Early the Day I Died (1997), which is adapted from the same original screenplay by Ed Wood.

Availability: For a variety of reasons which I will explain in the "backstory" section, this film is not legally available for home viewing or theatrical exhibition. It has been widely bootlegged, however, and may be available from third party sellers as a DVD-R.

The backstory: Ed Wood did not hold onto things. It wasn't that he didn't want to; it simply wasn't an option when he was being evicted from houses or apartments by impatient landlords every few years. When he died at the age of 54 in December 1978, Ed and his wife Kathy were living at the house of a generous friend, Peter Coe, in North Hollywood. The only surviving souvenirs of his thirty-year career in show business were the few mementos he could fit into a single suitcase. The rest had been thrown in the trash -- books, film scripts, unpublished manuscripts, the lot. Among the hearty survivors was an idiosyncratic screenplay that Ed had been revising since the early 1960s and finally completed in the mid-1970s.

In its earliest stages, this strange film-to-be was called The Silent Night or Night of Silence, but by 1974 it had morphed into I Awoke Early the Day I Died, the new title reminiscent of that famous opening line from Emily Dickinson's immortal Poem 465. ("I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died.") What made The Day I Died so unusual is that it told its surreal story without the benefit of dialogue. The script focuses on a resourceful madman known only as The Thief who kills a nurse, escapes from a sanitarium by donning her uniform, and then goes on a prolific crime spree, including several brazen acts of robbery and murder, before receiving his grim comeuppance. Much of the storyline centers around the members of a strange Hollywood cult. The Thief mistakenly blames these people for taking a stash of money he had stolen from a loan office. The majority of the running time is devoted to vignettes in which the Thief tracks down the cult members and kills them one by one.

The proposed cast: John Agar, Aldo Ray, and John Carradine.

As with many of his orphaned projects, Ed Wood had a cast in mind for The Day I Died, should he ever secure the funding for it. Veteran actor Aldo Ray, whose voluminous credits include The Green Berets (1969) and We're No Angels (1955), would have played the escaped madman. John Carradine, whom Eddie had also tapped to play the murderous wino Pete in his unrealized short film, To Kill a Saturday Night, was to have played a gravedigger who figures prominently in the plot. Actors David Ward and John Agar, meanwhile, would have played police officers. None of these stalwart performers would have been saddled with memorizing lines, since there were none in the script to memorize. Wood biographer Rudolph Grey suggests that perhaps Eddie was influenced by Robert Rouse's similarly wordless Cold War drama The Thief (1952) with Ray Milland. The fact that the protagonist of The Day I Died is known only as "The Thief" suggests Grey is correct in his supposition.

Keeper of the flame: Bob Blackburn

It is eerily appropriate that a screenplay called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was filmed 20 years after Ed Wood himself died. An honest-to-god finished film of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died finally appeared in theaters in October 1998 and had a spotty release history throughout the next calendar year. (Interestingly, of Ed Wood's hoped-for cast, only David Ward wound up being in the completed movie.) 

Despite some positive pre-release buzz and a cast full of recognizable stars, the film bombed badly. The critical reaction to The Day I Died can charitably be described as baffled hostility. Eventually, for various financial and legal reasons, the film vanished from the marketplace entirely. To this day, it has yet to reach a wide audience.

Nevertheless, bootleggers have given the film a shady afterlife of sorts, and the neglected project has garnered a cult following among die-hard Wood fans, including Philip R. Frey, who maintains the excellent Ed Wood Online site. "I'll admit I was unsure of this one," Frey writes, "but it totally won me over. From the psychedelic opening credits to the end, I liked what I saw." The webmaster concludes his review with a sentiment that might make the film's creators smile and cringe simultaneously: "It is a real pity that more people can't see this one. Hopefully it will be available on home video eventually. Until then, seek out whatever copy you can find." The fact that The Day I Died exists as a real-life movie at all is largely due to the intercession of two men named Bob, neither of whose names actually appear in the film's credits.

The first of these is Hollywood resident Bob Blackburn, who put in sixteen busy years as a music and promotions director for the Westwood One and Dial Global radio networks and is currently self-employed as the head of his own sound design firm. Blackburn, the son of a legendary Seattle SuperSonics announcer, became a friend of the late Kathy Wood in the autumn years of her life; he has worked diligently ever since to get Ed's movies and books back in front of the public eye. It is Bob, for instance, who acts as the administrator of the excellent Edward D. Wood, Jr. Facebook page, which is the closest thing Eddie has to an official presence on the social network. Lately, Bob's been working to make Rick Tell's Ed Wood: The Musical! a reality. 

And it was also Bob, still the most passionate Ed Wood advocate on the planet, who put me in touch with a couple of key behind-the-scenes players in the gnarly saga of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Eventually, through a few spirited rounds of phone-tag and e-mail-tag, I was able to contact these individuals and find out what they know about the production.

EYEWITNESS #1:

BOB WEINBERG (attorney)
interviewed 6/20/2014

NOTE: It had been my intention to bring you a recent phone interview I conducted with Bob Weinberg, an entertainment attorney who represented Kathy Wood in the 1990s. The original version of this article included at this juncture a description of my friendly, informative one-hour chat with Bob. After exchanging a few more e-mails with Bob once the article was posted, however, I have decided to remove this conversation from the piece entirely due to legal considerations. In its place, here is a statement from Mr. Weinberg regarding his involvement with Kathy Wood:

Ed Wood's widow, Kathy.

I met Bob Blackburn and Kathy Wood in 1993. Bob had been searching for an entertainment lawyer to help Kathy in connection with a Tim Burton film that was rumored to be in development then about her late husband Ed Wood, and Bob found me through a mutual friend who was a film editor. On the first day I met Kathy, I found her to be petite, friendly, warm and appreciative, and it was obvious that she had a great desire to make Ed’s unfulfilled dreams come true. On that first day, she mentioned an unproduced Ed Wood film script called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, and how much she would like to see it made. In the following years, Kathy, Bob and I shared some wonderful memories, like seeing Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic come to the screen. We struggled without much luck, however, with our plan to get I Woke Up Early the Day I Died produced, until we had the good fortune to meet Aris Iliopulos and Chris Hanley, who were both enthusiastic about the project from the start. 

A short time later I arranged for Kathy Wood to option the script to Aris, and he and Chris began to line up the astounding cast who ended in the film. Many months later, I remember getting a phone message from Aris about how excited Christina Ricci was to appear in the film, and Kathy and I began to get excited, thinking that the film might really get made. Some months after that, the film was set for production and Aris was gracious enough to give Kathy a minor role in the film, something which meant a lot to Kathy. She was especially excited to share a scene with Billy Zane, the film’s leading character, though she was also nervous about performing. I visited the set and was thrilled to see the terrific group of actors who were working on the film and seemingly having a very fun time of it. I remember meeting John Ritter on the set and I let him know how much it meant to Kathy that he was working on this project. 

Not too much time went by before Bob Blackburn, Kathy and I found ourselves watching a screening of the film at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was a dream come true for Kathy and her friends, and while this hard-charging action film with a loud rock and roll soundtrack felt different in tone from the story we had read on paper in script form, Kathy liked the energy of the film, loved how true it was to the storyline of the script, and was amazed that it had actually been made and included such a large and stellar cast. Kathy died about eight years after I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was shot, but getting this film produced, being in the film, and seeing it in a famous Hollywood Boulevard movie theater remained as some of Kathy Wood’s favorite experiences in the 13 years I was honored to know and work for her.

Thank you for that warm reminiscence, Bob. While I was deeply saddened to lose the interview, I'm glad that  Mr. Weinberg took the time to provide the preceding statement. I'm also grateful that the attorney put me in touch with the director of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, Aris Iliopulos. My conversation with him follows.

EYEWITNESS #2:

ARIS ILIOPULOS (artist/director)

interviewed 6/23/2014

Director Aris with Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and Karen Black at the film's premiere. (Photo courtesy Aris Iliopulos)

Talking at length to Aris Iliopulos, a fiercely independent Greek-born artist and occasional filmmaker, is the conversational equivalent of watching a pot of water come to a boil on the stove. Though his English syntax is slightly labored and artificial, rather like that of Bela Lugosi, the man's brain is positively bubbling with a dozen different ideas at once, all of which he sincerely wants to convey to his listener. "I'm talking too much," he half-apologetically says at more than one juncture during our 90-minute summit. I neither agree nor disagree, since I'm just desperately trying to keep up as I take notes with a stubby pencil on a yellow legal pad.

What I knew about Aris in advance, apart from what Bob Weinberg had told me, came from an interview the director had done at the time of the film's original release with entertainment journalist Daniel A. Dickholtz. Bob Blackburn had helpfully forwarded this piece to me, though he couldn't recall its exact source. The gaudy typeface and blood-soaked layout, along with the "F #186" watermark in the corner, leads me to believe it appeared in Fangoria under the name "What a Drag" in September 1999. The closest listing I can find, however, is one at the Texas A&M website, which says that the title was "Silent Stalker" and that it appeared in Fangoria's sci-fi themed sister publication, Starlog, in issue #268 from November 1999. Believe what you must.

Dickholtz's approaches the movie rather warily, and I feel he slightly misrepresents the Wood cult as a blinkered and delusional apologists who can see no wrong in their hero. Nevertheless, the article successfully conveys the almost childlike enthusiasm Iliopulos brought to I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Here, for your browsing pleasure, is that article in its entirety:

Click on the images above to see the pages full-sized.

As you might expect, Dickholtz focused much of his attention on the film's extremely eclectic and high-profile cast. Besides the always-dapper Billy Zane, who was then coming off his memorable role as a heel in James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic (1998), the cast of The Day I Died included a dizzying variety of film stars (Tippi Hedren, Bud Cort, Christina Ricci); television stars (Jonathan Taylor Thomas, John Ritter, Rick Schroder, Steven Weber); comedians and performance artists (Dana Gould, Sandra Bernhard, Taylor Negron, Ann Magnuson); Ed Wood associates (Vampira, Conrad Brooks, David Ward, Kathy Wood); and a whole host of unclassifiable showbiz legends of every description (ranging from Eartha Kitt and Karen Black to Tara Reid and Nicollette Sheridan).

According to the story, Billy was more than just the film's top-billed star; he also offered visual and music suggestions and even claimed a producer credit. He and Iliopulos were creatively simpatico, even though the director's original choice for the leading role was rock singer Iggy Pop! Also given some attention in the piece were the film's relatively paltry budget -- tactfully not specified but described by the director as "one of the smallest budgets ever" -- and very tight shooting schedule, which supposedly only lasted 20 days, all during August 1998. 

The magazine article is peppered with references to Aris Iliopulos' heroes in the world of art, theater, and cinema, including Federico Fellini, Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Bertolt Brecht. Aris thought of Ed Wood as an avant garde filmmaker and classified him alongside these other iconoclasts and innovators. While Iliopulos told Dickholtz he did not consciously imitate Ed Wood's visual style, he reasoned that he and Ed faced some of the same problems because of limited time and money.

Although it begins in an almost adversarial manner, Dickholtz's article eventually conveys a tone of extremely cautious quasi-optimism about all of this befuddling data. But the theatrical life of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died turned out to be a brief and troubled one, marked by grouchy reviews and nonexistent box office receipts. Had these sad circumstances, along with the sixteen intervening years, cooled Aris Iliopulos' ardor for the project? Not at all, as I was soon to find out.

Highlights from my 90-minute confab with Aris Iliopulos:

Excerpt from a 1998 film
festival catalog from AFI.

• These days, although he's frequently out of the country, Aris makes his home in New York City and is amused by the ridiculous obscurity of his one-and-only mainstream movie. "It's so Ed Wood, the whole thing!" He can't help but giggle as he remembers that the film's distributors went bankrupt just one day after the movie's NYC premiere. He has no residual bitterness about any of his experiences surrounding I Woke Up Early the Day I Died and is incredibly complimentary about everyone involved in the project. It's easy to see why Bob Weinberg described him as such a charmer.

• He takes some satisfaction in the fact that the film has played successfully in foreign countries, even though its shelf life in America was fleeting. "It's really big in Germany," he insists. Later in our talk, he says that "the Germans have a copy [of the film] in some refrigerator. They love Ed Wood there." He also mentions that the film has played well in both Japan and the Netherlands.

• Aris had been a fan of Ed Wood for many years before directing this film. He'd seen three of Eddie's movies (probably Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9) on PBS and been blown away by them. As he does in the Dickholtz article, the director makes frequent references to all his art-film heroes throughout our conversation. It's easy to see that Federico Fellini is to Aris Iliopulos what Orson Welles was to Ed Wood. 

• How did he, a first-time director, get to helm this project? Iliopulos attributes this to being at the right place at the right time. He went to lunch, he says, with "the Ed Wood people" one day in Los Angeles when Kathy Wood and the two Bobs were searching for a director. He read the script and was so taken with it that he made an "illegal" Xeroxed copy of it. "It was really me!" he enthuses.

• He and Kathy Wood got along well right from the start. "She's a jewel," he remembers. He refers to her both as his "muse" and "like a mother." She even gave him one of Eddie's rings to wear while making the movie. Kathy's uppermost concern was that the director not "bastardize" the script by adding dialogue. He didn't do this, even though he was tempted, because he promised to protect the integrity of Ed Wood's vision. "I saw it as an art piece," he explains. "I gave Kathy a big promise not to put in dialogue." Aris' own background is in the theater and in art films, and his movie idols are underground directors like Kenneth Anger.

• Christina Ricci, who had worked for producer Chris Hanley on Buffalo '66, was among the very first stars who signed on for the project. Aris was very impressed by Ricci, whom he repeatedly referred to as "amazing." Her performance in The Day I Died, he says, goes beyond mere acting and becomes more like "channeling." He's quick to point out, however, that he doesn't believe in ghosts.

• Iliopulos went to the Sundance film festival to generate interest in the project. He remembers the experience as being "hard" because the festival attendees were very skeptical about the prospect of a dialogue-free movie. In order to sweet talk celebrities into appearing in the film, the director literally wined and dined them by taking them to dinner.

• The pivotal moment in the film's pre-production stage came unexpectedly one day when Aris was visiting a friend's house. "The phone rang," the director remembers, "and it was Billy [Zane]." The actor originally asked Iliopulos to come down to Mexico to discuss the project. Since this wasn't possible, Zane instead came to Los Angeles to meet with Aris. There, the two discussed ways of doing the project and eventually settled on an approach that was heavily influenced by the commedia dell'arte, a form of theater which dates back to 16th century Rome. Of Zane's performance in the movie, Aris states: "There's a duality between being a human and being this crazy person."

• The director doesn't see The Day I Died as a silent movie but rather as a movie without dialogue. Aris was very taken with Ed Wood's typewritten, vodka-stained script, which explains his decision to include excerpts from the original document in the film as onscreen captions. "Let's put a typewriter there!" he says.

• Once Billy Zane got involved, word about the project spread fast in Hollywood. That's when other actors, including Karen Black, signed on. "Karen was a force of nature," Aris gushes. For her one big closeup, the director says, Karen Black was remembering an incident when she looked at a young man who was going to Vietnam and, in all probability, wasn't coming back home alive. Still today, Aris looks back with fondness at a series of "wonderful lunches" he had with Black.

• Aris was also very impressed with Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, who "didn't need any direction." As for the striking appearance of her scene, which was expanded somewhat from the original screenplay, the director says that this sequence shows the imprint of another prominent filmmaker. "That's my Fellini influence!" During filming, Vampira spoke of her affair with James Dean and presented Aris with a copy of Ed Wood's unfilmed script from the 1950s, The Ghoul Goes West, which he still very much wants to make into a movie even though "that screenplay needs work." A big part of his attraction to the project: "I really love Westerns!" As for casting ideas, he thinks Lady Gaga would be good in the film because "there's a lot of performances onstage."

Tippi Hedren with Aris. (Photo courtesy Aris Iliopulos)

• Regarding Tippi Hedren, Aris was able to confirm an amusing anecdote from the Dickholtz interview. On the day she was filming her death scene in San Pedro, CA, a whole flock of birds suddenly appeared behind her. While the director was amazed, the actress was nonplussed. "That happens all the time when I'm on the set," said the one-time star of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Viewers may notice that Tippi's big scene feels like a Hitchcock homage or parody. That was totally intentional, says Aris, who asserts that Eddie would have done the same thing. 

• Iliopulos is diplomatic when I bring up the topic of the film's icy critical reception. He says that the film inspires either love or hate from viewers, which is true to my experience. He seems to feel that the press unfairly categorized him as a pretentious intellectual. "People think I'm some kind of pompous artist," he muses. "I really don't take that very seriously." For the record, he rejects the idea that the film is too cerebral. "It's made more from the stomach than the brain," he insists.

• After the film was completed, the director traveled around with it from country to country on a promotional tour. But he did so at his own expense and had to stop when he arrived in Cuba and realized his bank account was down to $200. Had he had the money to do so, he would have liked to screen a version of The Day I Died in which the film itself is truly silent and the music is all provided by live musicians. Barring that, he'd like to stage a showing of the film at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, where Kathy Wood is "resting."

• One of Aris' greatest triumphs is that his movie played at the world-famous Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. "Eddie would walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard," Aris explains, "and he always wanted to have a screening at Mann's Chinese." After the movie played there, he says, Kathy Wood was in tears -- something which meant more to him than any review.

• Sandra Bernhard's attitude, the director says, was "I don't give a damn." She was very comfortable with her scene in which she dances in only pasties and a g-string; she would gladly have appeared nude had the director requested it. The only problem he encountered with Sandra was that she was unhappy with the "burlesque music" the director provided on the set and profanely demanded some "goddamned real music" in its place. Aris honored her request. "She was dancing to heavy metal," he remembers. Her scene, by the way, was filmed at the Ambassador Hotel, the site of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. "It was a little bit too much," he muses.

• Recently, Aris has been writing a prequel to the film, speculating what may have been happening to Billy Zane's character and to the cultists before the events shown in The Day I Died. He says he only has "forty pages" as of now, but this doesn't worry him because Fellini used to start making a movie with only 35 pages ready to go. The director has been doing quite a bit of writing lately and has even sold some screenplays. "Eddie taught me how to write," he says with pride. The director enjoys this new role, even though he's "a very visual person." Aris declares his love for "good dialogue" and said that he sometimes gets "bored with life" because real people don't always have great lines like movie characters do.

• The film's general lack of close-ups is a deliberate artistic decision by the director. In general, he explains, his favorite films are "movies I can see more than once because I don't know what happens next." He tried to make The Day I Died a film like that. Among the films he likes best are Lawrence of Arabia (which he watches "twice a year"), plus the works of Quentin Tarantino and Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar-winning Italian film La grande bellezza (2013).

• Mostly, Aris does not dwell on the past a great deal. "You move on with your life," he says. It's more important for him to concentrate on "what makes you happy as an artist." For him, that means more traveling and painting these days. "I'm happiest when I travel."

• Still to this day, Iliopulos is wary of Hollywood and the mainstream media, presumably because of his experience in the movie biz. "For a long time," he says, "I would not give interviews." As for his impressions of Tinsel Town, he says, "The backstabbing is a bit too much." 

• How did Eartha Kitt wind up in this movie? Well, Aris says, he approached her at a party and struck up a conversation. She said she had already been in an Ed Wood movie without really being in an Ed Wood movie! And how is this possible? In Plan 9 from Outer Space, Aris reports, you can see Eartha's name on a marquee! Poignantly, The Day I Died proved to be Eartha's farewell film.

• Iliopulos also spoke a bit about the film's original distributor, Cinequanon Pictures International. "Their bite was a little bit bigger than what they could chew," he insists, even though they were "very passionate" about the movie. 

• As you might guess for a star-studded film of this nature, "the set was like a nice party," even though the crew occasionally had to work all day and all night. While he was rushed and didn't have time to do everything he might have liked, Aris estimates he accomplished 90% of what he wanted.

• These days, Aris is mostly a photographer, artist, and world traveler. One of his art projects involved creating an "alter ego" that he would follow around. Another involved photographing African tribesmen. 

Billy Zane and his "mood suit."

• When I bring up the suit Billy Zane wears in the film, Aris takes the opportunity to effusively praise costume designer Mari An-Ceo for her tireless creativity, even though she went over budget. Aris and Mari worked together to make sure that the film's setting was deliberately vague, since Ed Wood's 1950s movies have a timeless quality to them. Aris asserts that the events in The Day I Died could be happening in the 1960s, the 1970s, or the 1990s. "It's all confusing!" he exclaims. Aris also informs me that Zane's character, The Thief, has three different suits and four shirts that he wears at different times in the movie. Why? "When he's really angry," the director explains, "I put him in a tight suit." And the shirts? Well, those change color, depending on the Thief's mood. Aris asks me if I noticed this, and I admit that I didn't... though it's possible this is because I was watching the film as a tiny YouTube video. "It's slight," responds the director, who says that this is another reason why the movie needs to be seen on the big screen.

• Being a fan of Bud Cort's work in Harold & Maude, Nashville, The Life Aquatic, Brewster McCloud, and many other films, I simply had to ask Aris what it was like to work with this beloved character actor, who for some arcane reason is billed as "Lord Heinrich 'Binky' Alcoa III" in the opening titles. "Bud was very professional," Aris remembers with characteristic fondness. Like many of the performers in this film, Cort apparently had a lot of ideas for his scenes. The actor also insisted on playing dual roles. Besides his main scene as the Franklin Pangborn-esque owner of a thrift store from which Billy Zane steals a pair of shoes, Bud also appears in drag as a Spanish senorita during the film's big carnival scene. The thrift shop, by the way, was a real establishment located directly across from Aris' hotel room and on the same block as the film's production office. The director describes it as "so fake it looks like a set."

• In case you were wondering: Yes, there is a director's cut of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. "I saved my first edit," says Aris. "Thank God." What was different about his original assemblage? "It was a more depressing movie," he says. Given that nearly every single character in The Day I Died is killed off, it's difficult to imagine a bleaker version of this film. Nevertheless, it's there in the director's personal collection, waiting to be unleashed.

• Perhaps the weirdest and most gratifying experience Aris Iliopulos had because of this movie was meeting Dolores Fuller, Ed's one-time girlfriend and the female lead in Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait. On one memorable occasion, Dolores brought over the famous pink angora sweater she'd once worn in Glenda, and together, she and Aris re-enacted the film's notorious climax. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall that day.

John Ritter and Karen Black

The viewing experience: Simultaneously bewitching, bothersome, and bewildering, Aris Iliopulos' I Woke Up Early the Day I Died is a film unlike any I have previously witnessed. The film shows the unmistakable earmarks of the Edward D. Wood, Jr. canon, yet it is tonally dissimilar to the kinds of movies Eddie made in the 1950s. It announces its rebellious otherness during the opening credits with a blast of angry, in-your face punk rock called "Jesus I Was Evil" by the late Darcy Clay. The Day I Died is actually dedicated to Clay, a New Zealander who tragically committed suicide mere months before the film debuted. In truth, according to those who knew him well, Eddie hated rock music; his idea of a good tune was "Amazing Grace."

Interestingly, both "Jesus I Was Evil" and "Amazing Grace" are about contrite sinners who have seen the errors of their ways. But "Grace" is manifestly humble and sincere, while "Jesus" seems defiant and sardonic. Clay spits and snarls the lyrics like he's itching for a fight. Because of factors like this, I'm not sure what Eddie would have thought of Aris Iliopulos' film, which sometimes feels like a cross between a very long music video and an extremely chic high-fashion photo shoot.

Ultimately, this is not Eddie's movie. It's Aris' movie. Aris says he would have loved to have seen Eddie's version of The Day I Died, and so would I. But this isn't possible. Eddie's long gone, and we have to learn to appreciate the movie that does exist rather than the one that should exist. Frankly, this was easier than I was expecting. Though it took me a while to adjust to the hip, artsy, punky feel of the 1998 film, by about the 20-minute mark, I was eager to see what would happen next. As a serious Ed Wood-ologist, meanwhile, I couldn't help but notice each of the classic Woodian motifs on display here. An alphabetical inventory might include: alcohol, bums, cemeteries, circuses, cowboys, crime, cults, funerals, gravediggers, hospitals, insanity, murder, nighttime, strippers, theft, and transvestism. They're all here, and photographed so strikingly!

Tellingly, though The Thief is only in drag for a few minutes in the film itself, the image of Zane in the blonde wig and nurse's uniform was used prominently in the marketing materials simply because Ed Wood is so closely associated with cross-dressing. The Thief's daring escape from the sanitarium, by the way, is very similar to a scene in Ed Wood's 1967 novel Devil Girls. And John Ritter's character, a villainous Western star performing at a carnival sideshow, is clearly inspired by Ed's good friend Kenne Duncan. It's just odd to think of Ritter, with his round, friendly face and kind eyes, playing a part inspired by the gaunt and severe-looking Duncan. Perhaps my favorite sequence, visually speaking, is the one with seven-foot-tall Carel Struycken, best known as Lurch in the '90s Addams Family movies, as a sinister undertaker who chases after Billy Zane after the latter breaks into a mortuary. It is here that Iliopulos' background in art and photography really pays off, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

Carel "Lurch" Struycken as an undertaker in I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.

Having been cloistered in the world of Edward D. Wood, Jr. for months on end and thus lacking any objectivity whatsoever, I wanted to get a fresh perspective on this particular motion picture. So I turned to one of the Internet's brightest lights, Ms. Emily Intravia of The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense and The Feminine Critique, for a review of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. I specifically instructed her to watch the movie "cold" with no advance research or preparation. I will now turn the article over to her. 

I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED

reviewed by Emily Intravia

Eartha Kitt in The Day I Died.

An Eartha Kitt musical performance. Men wearing mesh t-shirts with stylishly solid short sleeves. Mark Boone Junior revealing what his face looks like sans facial hair. And, ladies, Billy Zane. 

Billy Zane, Billy Zane, and a whole lot of Billy Zane. 

I Woke Up Early the Day I Died has a lot going for it -- ample connections to improve your Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-ing, for one. But whereas your fearless leader Joe will undoubtedly wax wonders on how the film opens a window into the mind of Ed Wood, I’d like to use this space to point out just what an interesting physical actor a certain end-of-the-alphabet B-lister really is. 

Essentially a silent film, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died makes fine use of Zane, something I so rarely get to say in my fandom. As an escaped mental patient-turned-bank robber and murderer credited as "The Thief," he carries the experimental story with a truly unique and more importantly, committed charisma. Based on the indie nature of the film, I imagine most of the cameo-ing cast took part as a quick favor or to satisfy some curiosity in between what must have been better-paying projects. Random powerhouses like Karen Black, Tippi Hedren, Ron Perlman, and for complete trivia fun, Jonathan Taylor Thomas must have had some fun, but as Zane occupies virtually every scene, that dude had to work. 

I did not enter I Woke Up Early the Day I Died with much information, although I was able to piece together the experiment fairly quickly: director Aris Iliopulos has adapted an unfilmed screenplay by the late Ed Wood. Using an eclectic assortment of Hollywood and underground actors, a (what I’m guessing to be) small amount of money, and extremely hard-working sound design, Iliopulos has produced one strange little journey. 

I say that with true affection: I enjoyed this movie. While the novelty did wear off at a certain point, the ambition of the project remained admirable and throughout the (sometimes literal) running time, Billy Zane remained inherently watchable. The film had a certain Bad Boy Bubby-ness to it with a little more screwball comedy tossed in for good measure. In the end, I don’t necessarily know what it says about cinema -- a second watch with better note taking would be necessary for such a grand thesis -- but I certainly endorse its existence in the name of risk-taking filmmaking and Billy Zane celebration.

Thank you, Emily, for that independent and objective critical assessment. 

***

Before I dismiss this class, I'd like to take you all back to those halcyon days of the late 1990s and show you the original theatrical trailer for I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Listen closely and you will discern that much (perhaps all) of the music is cribbed from Howard Shore's indelible score for the Tim Burton film Ed Wood from 1994:

The soundtrack album.

It's important to point out here that movie trailers frequently borrow music from other films simply because they are assembled before the real movie has been completed. It's not laziness or thievery, just practicality. The completed version of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died has plenty of music of its own. Besides the aforementioned "Jesus I Was Evil" by Darcy Clay, the soundtrack also incorporates some golden oldies by jazz greats like Nat "King" Cole ("Nature Boy") and Jack Teagarden ("Puttin' and Takin'"). These are artists with whom Ed Wood would have been much more familiar, so their music fits in very well in his world.

Beyond that, though, the film boasts an excellent and evocative original score by Larry Groupe. Producer/star Billy Zane describes Groupe's music for the film as "ambient hymns [which] create a melodic melting pot both scary and funny, sad and ironic, connecting you directly to the splintered psychology of 'The Thief.'" For those parties who are interested in such things, Mr. Groupe sells the soundtrack for a mere ten bucks directly from his personal website. I think I'll have to purchase this little item myself, if only to provide the perfect musical accompaniment for those crazy nights when I put on my fanciest duds and go prowling the lonely streets with vengeance on my mind.

In two weeks: Did you know that we are rapidly approaching the one-year anniversary of Ed Wood Wednesdays? As originally planned, this series was supposed to have ended after three months. THREE MONTHS! What the hell have I gotten myself into? 

In the spirit of settling old scores and righting old wrongs, I have decided that the next film on the docket shall be a well-known feature documentary about Ed Wood which I have not yet reviewed as part of this series, even though it was pictured prominently in the very first entry way back in July 2013. Go back to that article, and you'll see it nestled comfortably between Orgy of the Dead and Glen or Glenda? among the DVDs I had lined up for review. How naive I was back then! How little I knew of the world! 

Anyway, you make sure and get yourself right back here in two weeks when I finally, finally cover The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1995).

Water towers I have known and feared

Flushing, MI's infamous "smiley face water tower." Photo (obviously) by someone named Bruce Larkin.

Childhood is a rich, flavorful stew of unresolved fears. I had a relatively uneventful upbringing, and yet when I cast my mind back to those early days, what rises to the surface more readily than anything else is the terror I felt at being so small and in a world that was so strange and often unwelcoming.

The town where I did most of my growing up was called Flushing, MI, and one of its few really distinctive features was a bright yellow water tower with a giant smiley face painted on it. We all called it (get this) the Smiley Face Water Tower, and although it was intended as cute and whimsical, it inspired within me a deep and restless dread. Why? Those eyes, man! Those unblinking, soulless eyes, always staring at you!

I first saw the SFWT at the age of six, and in retrospect it was probably the closest thing Flushing had to a life-size replica of the Lord God Almighty. As it happens, old Smiley has a peripheral but still-significant place in popular culture, as evidenced by this 2004 write-up on the Roadside America website. A contributor named Dan McGraw reports:

There's a smiley face water tower in Flushing, MI. It got painted that way around the Bicentennial and occasionally gets repainted with the same design. For reasons I'm not sure of, it got nicknamed "Kick-boy-Face" by the local early punk rockers, and it kinda stuck. It has a drainage pipe that runs top to bottom, and it makes an awesome echo if you yell into it.

McGraw also says that there is a similar tower in the movie Natural Born Killers but does not specify whether it's actually the one from Flushing. (There are apparently many such towers in the United States.)

I have a couple of further comments to make about McGraw's review of the monument. I lived in Flushing for twenty years -- 1981 to 2001 -- and I never heard anyone call this tower "Kick-boy-Face." Not once. It was always the Smiley Face Water Tower. Moreover, during those two decades, I never noticed that Flushing had any sort of burgeoning punk rock scene. And if the tower's drainage pipe was particularly famous, I didn't know about that either. Mr. McGraw may be correct on all these points; his account just doesn't align with my own personal memories of the Smiley Face Water Tower.

What I recall was simply a giant, canary-colored monolith with a painted-on grin. As for its precise location, that's trickier to sort out. Flushing had at least two big water towers, and I seem to remember that the SFWT was near enough to my school that I could stare up at it from the playground. These could be false memories, though.

A quick Internet search reveals that there is indeed a water tower very near my alma mater, Springview Elementary ("Home of the Sharks"), but whether it's the infamous SFWT is impossible to tell. There's a Google Maps photo of the tower here, but it's taken from an angle that almost cruelly obscures the design. It looks like it certainly could be the one, but I'm not placing any bets on it.

UPDATE: A former classmate of mine, Denise Mercer Blackwell, has informed me that the SFWT was, in fact, the one next to the elementary school and provides this incredible anecdote, via Facebook: "It was across from the school. I remember in 6th grade Mr. D [that's Mr. Dumler, our sixth grade homeroom teacher during the 1986-1987 school year. - J.B.] had to shut the blinds because someone was on top of it, evidently going to jump, and we could not pay attention for all the emergency vehicles. I never look at that water tower without thinking of that day." I must admit, I had totally blacked that out of my memory. Thanks, Denise!

Daddy Long Legs or robot camels?

While Smiley loomed largest in my nightmares, I had a general fear of water towers when I was a kid. I was quite the Star Wars fan back then, and for some reason the towers reminded me of the heavily-armed All Terrain Armored Transports (aknown as AT-ATs or Walkers) used by the villains in The Empire Strikes Back. The animated TV show Family Guy referred to these fearsome machines as "robot camels" during its 2009 Empire spoof entitled "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side," but the Transports looked more like giant Daddy Long Legs to me. At least, that's how I saw them back then.

Anyway, a persistent fantasy/worst case scenario of mine in those days was that all the water towers of the world would spontaneously come to life one day and start stalking the earth on those long, spindly legs of theirs, crushing everything in their path and causing widespread destruction and panic among the citizenry. I pictured people running and screaming as they were being chased by the now-ambulatory water towers, which moved with a horrendously loud mechanical screeching, their footsteps landing on the ground with the weight of circus elephants.

Smiley, of course, would be leading the charge. Perhaps that was why he'd been grinning smugly all those years. He was just biding his time, waiting for the day when he and his water tower brethren could finally get revenge on their dreaded human oppressors.

Funny how kids think, isn't it?

Here's how 'The Super Friends' messed up a whole generation of kids

Hey, kids! See this stuff? Don't do it. 

Those screenshots up there are from a September 24, 1977 episode of the ABC animated series The All-New Super Friends Hour. Specifically, these images were culled from a segment called "Hitchhike" in which the Wonder Twins, a pair of incredibly wholesome super-powered teenage alien siblings, have to rescue a girl who is kidnapped while thumbing a ride. 

Obviously, the point of the show is that kids shouldn't take ride from strangers because there are some weird, dangerous people out there. That's an admirable message, I guess, if a little heavy for a Saturday morning cartoon show. But how did Super Friends go about conveying this vital lesson to their young audience? 

Well, for one thing, they drew the hitchhiker as a statuesque, Monroe-type blonde and put her in hot pants and a sleeveless t-shirt, thus making her only slightly more covered-up than Wonder Woman. They even give her a modified Betty Page hairdo. 

And, of course, the plot requires this young lady to be saved by the Wonder Twins rather than chopped up and discarded in a ditch by the highway. So not only is she totally fine, she gets to meet and interact with superheroes from outer space! Is this going to deter anyone from hitchhiking? To me, this glamorizes some risky behavior. 

The show kind of clouds the issue, too, by having her hitchhike right next to a sign that reads "BUS STOP." Does she not know what that sign means? Does she think that green sedan is a bus, maybe? Maybe at the end of the show, the Wonder Twins could have explained to this young lady how public transportation works. 

As it is, the show is basically a how-to, step-by-step instructional video for hitchhiking. Hey, kids, see what this sexy blonde lady is doing? Don't do it. Maybe this episode inspired a whole generation of kids to head downtown, park themselves on street corners, stick their thumbs out, and take the first ride they get from strange men in pea-green Buicks. If so, their blood is on your hands, Hanna Barbera.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 41: 'Ed Wood: The Musical!' (2014)

Ed Wood, Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Tor Johnson croon their way into your hearts in Ed Wood: The Musical!

The VHS edition.

"Recommend this comedy to friends!"

Such was the advice of a label affixed by the Walt Disney Company to a VHS copy of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, which I purchased used sometime in the mid-1990s from a Flint, MI-area Meijer store. Back then, this type of corporate suggestion -- common to videotapes of the era -- struck me as merely pushy and presumptuous.

But now, nearly a year into the Ed Wood Wednesdays project, Disney's corporate suggestion raises some existential issues. Namely, is Ed Wood's life a comedy? I guess his famed 1994 biopic fits into that category as well as or better than it does any other. Purely from a mathematical standpoint, the funny scenes in Ed Wood (Ed and his cronies steal a rubber octopus from a Republic Pictures warehouse) outnumber the sad/poignant ones (Ed learns by phone that Bela Lugosi has died) by a hefty margin.

But Ed Wood's true story, the stuff that actually happened to this guy? There's only one word for that: tragedy. Other than the part about being "highly renowned and prosperous," Edward D. Wood, Jr. fits Aristotle's definition of a tragic hero. In the Aristotelian tradition, such a protagonist is a man "who is not eminently good and just, whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” As you may remember from your school days, the most common tragic flaw is hubris, i.e. "a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power." If being a movie director can be considered "a position of power," then this is a perfect description of Ed Wood.

A nice, hardworking kid from Poughkeepsie, NY, he thought he had what it took to make it in the motion picture business and so moved out West to California. Thirty-one years later, at the age of only 54, he died a penniless and thoroughly disillusioned alcoholic, having worked almost exclusively in pornography for the last two decades of his career.

The movie Ed Wood soft-pedals these disturbing, depressing aspects of his life. The biopic depicts him going to bars a few times during his low moments. On one occasion, while trying without luck to raise the funds for Bride of the Atom (later Bride of the Monster), he meets Loretta King and mistakes her for a potential backer. On another day, frustrated with the Baptists who are bankrolling Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed visits a bar in full drag and gets an unexpected pep talk from his hero, Orson Welles.

But there's no sense from the biopic that we're seeing a man in the early stages of very serious alcoholism. An on-screen caption near the end of the movie describes Eddie's later life as "a slow descent into alcoholism and monster nudie films." That's true, but it's also a very genteel way of putting it. We don't see the out-of-control binges which brought out a dark, violent side to Eddie's personality. If there is one fact which has troubled me the most about Wood's life throughout the last year, it's the knowledge that Ed physically abused his wife, Kathy, while he was intoxicated.

The infamous "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode.

Given what we now know about him, why isn't Ed Wood's life treated as a tragedy instead of a comedy? Well, frankly, it's because the most interesting details of his biography are the ones that inspire laughter. Eddie made ludicrous, low-budget films about monsters, aliens, and mad scientists. He had a fetish for angora sweaters and lacy lingerie. His cadre of stars included a phony psychic, a Swedish wrestler, a beatnik goth chick, and a retirement-age Dracula.

We judge artists, and not unreasonably so, by their work that survives into our time. And what survives from Ed Wood's career? A handful of cheapskate sci-fi/horror flicks with nonexistent production values, a few more weirdly naive attempts at pornography, and a lot of sleazy paperback novels which were sold in all the worst bookshops in town. People find Ed's work funny, so they find his life funny, too.

When The Golden Turkey Awards made Ed Wood an unlikely posthumous star, only the silliest details of his life bubbled to the surface at first. The sadder aspects of his troubled, too-brief existence weren't widely known for another decade, and by then he was firmly established as an icon of 1950s camp, a figure of fun. And if Eddie's legacy is making people laugh, what's so bad about that? It's a tough, tough world -- as Ed himself knew all too well -- and we need all the laughter we can get sometimes.

On the other hand, it seems particularly cruel to turn Edward D. Wood, Jr. into a clown, since he already faced plenty of rejection, ridicule, and adversity during his own life. One is reminded of the infamous "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which poor Minnesota news producer Mary Richards has to stifle her laughter repeatedly when hearing about the death of a local TV clown, Chuckles, who was killed by an elephant while dressed as a peanut. It is only at Chuckles' funeral -- when Mary is advised by a kindly clergyman to laugh freely because that's what Chuckles would have wanted -- that she bursts into uncontrollable sobs.

So what is the duty of the modern writer who chooses Ed Wood as a subject? The public will want to see fuzzy sweaters, stolen octopi, and flying saucers on strings. And the wise writer will give them exactly those things. But it's also important to acknowledge that there was more to this man than just these iconic props and accessories. There was a real, thinking, feeling human being behind the laughable myth, and his story deserves to be told, too, especially since it serves as a cautionary fable about the American character and the American dream. How do you find a balance which will please the camp-loving audience and not betray the real Ed Wood in the process? These are the questions I pondered as I explored the depths of...

ED WOOD: The Musical! (2014)

Currently, this is your only way to enjoy the delights of Ed Wood: The Musical!

Alternate titles: None of which I am aware.

Availability: Quick! Check the calendar! Are you reading this on or before June 22, 2014? If so, you can catch a live script reading of Ed Wood: The Musical! at the Actors Reading Room at OutCentral, an LGBT center in Nashville, TN. Otherwise, your best bet is to check out Rick Tell's SoundCloud page, which has the play's entire musical score available for free listening!

The backstory: Who better to tell you about the origins of Ed Wood: The Musical! than its creator, Rick Tell? Mr. Tell was gracious enough to answer some of my questions via e-mail. Here, then, is a little Q&A session for your enlightenment.

The Reppies.

Q: What is your own musical background? 

I have been involved in music practically all my life and professionally since my late teens. I toured and recorded throughout the 1970s and started producing music in my home town of NYC around 1978. Also during that time I participated in the BMI theater workshop under the late Lehman Engel.  Although I had some success in the record biz,  [hitting] #5 [on the] national Billboard dance music chart [with a record on] RCA. I left the feast or famine insecurity and made my living composing and producing music for radio and TV as well as corporate shows and videos up until 1992. I then spent the next 6 years as music producer for a PBS TV show (The Reppies) down in Orlando FL. I moved back to NYC in 1998 and then to Nashville in 2000 where I teach audio recording and produce local recording artists.

Q: How did you come to write an Ed Wood musical? 

During my time in Orlando (1990-1998), I was approached by a TV producer client that I had written some jingles for in NY to write some melodies for lyrics in a play with music about Ed Wood. I did, and the author and the producer seemed pleased. NOTHING came of it, but I thought it was a good concept so ten years later (2004), now living in Nashville, I set out to write my own Ed Wood musical from scratch. I collaborated with a Nashville writer but the script did not work although my songs were very well received. About five years ago I put a link to my songs on a Yahoo! Ed Wood appreciation page and soon after met my now very good friend and supporter Bob Blackburn. The local writer wrote a new script (mostly by himself), and thanks to Bob B. we did 2 readings in Hollywood over the next 2 years. This script failed miserably, so two years ago I decided (out of the frustration of not being able to find a writer that was competent and reliable) to write my own script. Believe it or not my script has gotten a good response. And we did a reading in Hollywood two months ago.  With the feedback and reactions it received I feel I have really tightened it up and it is close to being ready for production. However in order to get things right I am doing another reading here in Nashville on June 22 where I can spend more time rehearsing to get it better.  

Q: What were the circumstances behind the recording of the soundtrack? Who was involved? 

I wrote all the lyrics and melodies for all the songs. I produced all [the recordings] in my home studio. All the arrangements and orchestrations are my handiwork as well. I sing the roles of Ed Wood, Bela and Tor. I played most of the instruments except guitars, sax, flute, clarinet, solo violin, and the trumpets and trombone on "Shirley" and "600 Steps". I used friends and local talent to sing the female leads, group vocals, and some of the male leads on "Plan 9."

Q: What is the current status of the Ed Wood musical? 

There is still interest in Los Angeles but so far no money. There is also interest in Las Vegas, where we are trying to produce a showcase. I have joined forces with some very active and enthusiastic theater people here in Nashville, and after the reading in June I am going to try to produce the show here possibly through a grant.

A huge thank you to Rick Tell for agreeing to this little interview. I should also take the time to thank Bob Blackburn, a close personal friend of the late Kathy Wood who now looks after her estate. Bob has been a tremendous help throughout this entire project. To keep tabs on Rick Tell's show, I'd suggest you check the musical's Facebook page, which is updated with any pertinent news.

Perez Prado: The soundtrack of the '50s.

The listening experience: Didn't I already cover an Ed Wood musical as part of Ed Wood Wednesdays? Well, yeah, I did. It was Josh Alan Friedman's The Worst! (1994), and it was thoroughly dissected in Week 39. As I said back then, Friedman's musical was more like an Ed Wood-themed concept album by a singer-songwriter with country folk leanings. Several of its tracks were instrumentals, and there was no real narrative through-line to it that I could detect.

Ed Wood: The Musical! (hereafter EW:TM) is much larger and more ambitious in scope. Boiled down to just its songs, it's still twice as long as The Worst! But, still, Ed Wood: The Musical! and The Worst! cover the same basic territory, so it's no surprise that there are substantial musical and lyrical similarities between the two shows, though they were conceived very separately.

The twangy Texan tendencies of The Worst! are entirely absent in EW:TM, but both shows largely evoke the 1950s through the musical genres which would have been popular during Eddie's heyday: jazz, swing, and Latin pop. Remember that mambo king Perez Prado was ruling the charts while Ed Wood was making his best-known films. For instance, Prado's "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" was #1 for 10 weeks in 1955, the same year that saw the release of Bride of the Monster.

Meanwhile, the title of Rick Tell's show might make fans wonder if EW:TM is an adaptation of Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood. The answer is no. This is a distinct work, to be judged on its own merits and not tied to any one particular movie. But again there is significant overlap between the film and this musical. The image of Eddie fighting in World War II with women's underwear hidden beneath his Marine uniform proves too tempting for any of these versions to skip. It appears in Ed Wood, The Worst!, and EW:TM. Viewers who have seen Ed Wood dozens of times (and that includes me) will discover any number of plot points shared by these two works. To wit:

• Bela Lugosi has a bitter, long-standing rivalry with Boris Karloff and reveals that he himself could have played the monster in 1931's Frankenstein. (The fact that Lugosi eventually did play the monster in 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man goes unmentioned.)
• Dolores Fuller, Ed's girlfriend, is uncomfortable with her boyfriend's transvestism and despises his eccentric friends. She leaves him to pursue her own career ambitions.
• Kathy Wood, Ed's wife, is much more understanding and forgiving about his cross-dressing and proves a loyal, faithful companion over the course of many rocky years.
• Ed's transvestism can be traced back to his mother, who always wanted a girl and dressed her young son up as one.
• Ed has a deep and abiding fetish for angora and worships Orson Welles.
• Dolores is jealous when Ed gives the lead role in Bride of the Monster to Loretta King.
• Vampira is utterly unimpressed by Ed and considers him a no-talent hack.
• Plan 9 from Outer Space is financed by a Baptist church, and the backers insist that the film's cast and crew get properly baptized.

As for the songs themselves, I thought I'd do with them what I did with the songs from The Worst! That is to say, I'll go through them one by one and give you my thoughts and impressions of each individual track. Sound good? Then let us proceed.

1. "Monsters" (3:33) - The show's curtain-raiser is a group number sung by the fictional creatures created by Edward D. Wood, Jr.  Musically, this number is a boisterous tango with some percussion sounds provided by a typewriter. (This is another trait EW:TM shares with The Worst!) Throughout the show, Eddie's three most famous creations -- Bride of the Monster (1955), Glen or Glenda? (1953), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) -- get the most attention, and that's to be expected. Those are the works that people know. But very quickly, Rick Tell shows a willingness to expand beyond the "big three." The lyrics to "Monsters" reference not only The Bride and the Beast (1958) but also Eddie's 1963 novel Killer in Drag and its "transvestite assassin" character, Glenda Satin. So EW:TM scores major brownie points with hardcore Wood-ologists in the early stages.

Sample lyric: "Escaped his brain, we come to life. We run amok whenever Eddie starts to type."

2. "600 Steps" (4:47) - I was unable to procure a copy of the script for EW:TM, but Rick Tell informs me that this song is meant to take place in 1978 on the day Ed dies. The lyrics of this smoky jazz song point out something I'd never considered before: that Ed Wood's infamous "Yucca Flats" apartment at the corner of Yucca and Cahuenga in Los Angeles is a mere "six-hundred steps to Hollywood and Vine and the Hollywood Walk of Fame," signaling just how maddeningly close Ed was from the showbiz aspirations he'd always chased. We get some biographical details here, too. Ed tells us he moved to Hollywood "thirty-one years ago," meaning 1947. Interestingly, this song goes where The Worst! and Ed Wood feared to tread and very openly discusses Ed's serious alcoholism. There's a particularly nasty exchange between Ed and Kathy here:

Kathy: Ed, you're a miserable bastard! It's only 10 a.m., and you're already plastered! 

Ed: Shut up, you bitch! Must you always nag? Did you get me some vodka? What's in the bag? And there's nothing but food! You stupid bitch! Where's the booze?

Obviously, Rick Tell is interested in more than presenting Ed Wood as a cute, quirky oddball as in the Tim Burton film.

3. "Our Little Secret" (2:28) - A tender little ballad in which Ed tries to keep his cross-dressing hidden from the rest of the world. It takes the form of a duet, presumably between Ed and his own feminine side. The lyrics evoke some of the famous dialogue from Glen or Glenda? about snips, snails, puppy dog tails, and other stereotypical "male" signifiers.

Sample lyric: "We feel so close, dressing up in pretty clothes."

Ed Wood (center) in his military uniform.

4. "Shirley" (3:48) - I'd have to say this tune, a tribute to Ed's drag persona, is my single-favorite song from EW:TM. To me, it sounds like the kind of thing that Frankie Avalon might have sung on a long, lonely night when he fantasized about being Annette Funicello. Just like "Let Me Die in Angora" from The Worst!, this song hinges on the obvious irony of a cross-dressing Marine. In fact, "Shirley" begins with militaristic snare drums and a hint of the "Marine Corps Hymn." Nearly two minutes in, the song truly comes alive with a chirpy female backing chorus which really does make it seem like Frankie Avalon's "Venus" gone berserk.

Sample lyric: "I'll now reveal what I concealed beneath my uniform."

5. "Hollywood" (0:35) - Rick Tell has mentioned his background in jingle-writing, which helps explain this jazzy little petit-four of a song in which a young Ed Wood outlines his too-ambitious plan to conquer Hollywood.

6. "I Hate Boris" (3:24) - For many viewers, a highlight of Tim Burton's Ed Wood is Bela Lugosi's (Martin Landau) profane rant about his rivalry with Boris Karloff. This song is basically that same tirade set to music. Once again, as in The Worst!, Lugosi is associated with Eastern Eurpean folk tunes. This is a man from "the old country" singing in the style of "the old country." The song starts with a mournful violin before becoming a more sprightly two-step as Bela critiques Boris' acting techniques. ("He was crummy as the mummy and his Frankenstein, what a stiff!") What's interesting here is that the Karloff/Lugosi rivalry may be entirely one-sided. Lugosi seems to blame all his own career woes on Karloff, but there is no indication that the Englishman sees their relationship this same way.

Sample lyric: "And even though Universal from me struck it rich, they usurped me as king of the horrors with Boris, that son of a bitch!"

7. "Glen or Glenda?" (4:17) - All of Ed Wood's aforementioned "big three" movies get songs named after them in EW:TM.  This selection features a mixed chorus which chants the title over and over, like baseball fans razzing a rival outfielder. Musically, I'd classify this as a modern show tune, not tied to any particular era or genre. Lyrically, the song is a summary of the film for which it is named. Some parts of Bela Lugosi's narration are quoted verbatim. ("Man's constant groping of things unknown...") The Oedipal nature of the plot is emphasized, with Glen's cross-dressing stemming from his relationship with his mother. I believe the intended effect is to draw a connection between this movie and Ed Wood's own life. Again, as with "Our Little Secret," Ed's dual nature is demonstrated by making this song a duet between a male vocalist and a female one. Here, unlike in the movie, Glen gets to duet with Glenda and exchange ideas with her, as if they really were two separate people. Ah, the magic of stagecraft!

8. "Angora" (2:22) - You knew this was coming, right? Not much to say here. This is Ed's chipper paean to Turkish rabbit fur. Kudos to Rick Tell for rhyming the titular, fuzzy fabric with "Bora Bora," "flora," "aura," and "I adore ya." This is another lightly Latinized number, one likely not intended to be taken very seriously.

Sample lyric: "Mere sable and mink do not quench my kink. They just leave me cold."

9. "Look Into My Eyes" (3:35) - Another quality shared by EW:TM, The Worst!, and Ed Wood is the portrayal of the waning Bela Lugosi as a pathetic, pitiable, semi-delusional figure -- Blanche DuBois in a vampire cape. In "Look Into My Eyes," Bela is clearly losing his grip and has given in to self-pity. The title is a clever play on the hypnotism schtick from both Dracula and Bride of the Monster. Here, though, Bela really does want us to look into his eyes because he wants us to see him as he really is and, thus, share a little of his pain. "Once I was invincible, now I grow weaker by the hour," he admits at one point, even though he also claims he's "as strong and vibrant as [he] was at 25." This is a dour number, of course, but it helps to lend EW:TM a little gravitas.

Sample lyric: "There is no sadder spectacle than to see a Transylvanian cry."

10. "Bride of the Monster" (3:07) - The second of the songs named after Ed's "big three," this is decidedly not a summary of the movie. Instead, it's a musical declaration of independence by Dolores Fuller, who slinks her way through this like Julie London singing "Cry Me a River." "Bride of the Monster" also reminded me a bit of "Big Spender" from Sweet Charity. The gist of it is that tough-broad Dolores is tired of dating a guy who dresses like a gal. Besides, she's got real showbiz ambitions, and Ed seems to be going nowhere fast. So she's outta here, baby! This song gives us a new spin on the title, too. When Dolores declares she doesn't "wanna be the bride of the monster," the "monster" to whom she's referring may be Ed Wood. And she didn't wind up as his bride, as history records.

Sample lyric: "My heart but not my clothes I'll share."

11. "Magnificent Carcasses" (3:34) - In telling the Ed Wood story, you have to also tell the story of the bizarre and unique stars with whom he surrounded himself. With "Magnificent Carcasses," Rick Tell gives us a twofer: Tor Johnson and Vampira. These are actors most notable for their striking appearances. Both resemble comic book characters come to life, and this song, a happy-go-lucky waltz in the best "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" tradition, expounds on that. Personality-wise, Vampira comes off as a rather snooty elitist and self-styled artiste. Tor, as always, is the enthusiastic, overgrown kid with the bottomless appetite. The hook for the song comes from an anecdote about Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and her affair with Orson Welles, the latter of whom gave his lady love "the clap" (aka gonorrhea).

Sample lyric: "Our magnificent carcasses make us stand out from the crowd!"

12. "Hollywood Rat Race" (3:14) - This hep, swingin' number proves that Rick Tell did his homework. Once again, we venture boldly past the "big three" and into Ed's literary career. This song is clearly derived from Ed's circa 1965 book of the same name in which he gives advice, mostly to wannabe starlets, about making it in Tinsel Town. Oddly, this song transported me back to the days of Schoolhouse Rock!, except instead of grammar and the multiplication tables, Ed Wood is offering lessons about getting headshots and meeting with producers. Naturally, as in the book, Eddie is somewhat self-aggrandizing, but he shows a genuine concern for the young ladies by telling him that they shouldn't need to provide sexual favors in order to get work. By the way, this is the second-consecutive song to reference Orson Welles, in case you were counting.

Sample lyric: "Girls, remember, you're unique... just like everyone else."

13. "I'm Just Mad About Science" (5:00) - Composer Rick Tell comes off as a bit of a musical mad scientist with this gonzo track about Bride of the Monster and its bedeviled antihero, Dr. Eric Vornoff (as played by Bela Lugosi). This is a Frankenstein-esque creation, stitched together from several smaller songs into one lurching, lumbering beast of a tune. First up is a bombastic and bathetic musical treatment of the infamous "Home? I have no home!" monologue. This segues into a parody of "I'm Just Wild About Harry," a vintage 1921 show tune which later became a much-covered popular standard. After that is a passage of what I'd call vintage go-go-dancer music, with Vornoff trading lines with female reporter Janet Lawton (as played by Loretta King). And then, just when you thought this song couldn't get weirder, it segues unexpectedly into thumping, thudding techno music of a much more recent vintage. I was kind of dumbfounded by "I'm Just Mad About Science" and am eager to see how this would be staged in a full production.

14. "Dreamer" (3:52) - After the sturm und drang of the previous number, we need a little respite, don't we? Hence this gentle, wistful ballad in which Ed Wood looks back (in angora?) at the shows he used to put on as a kid, sometimes wearing his mother's clothes as a costume. "That child still dwells inside this man," Eddie says. This claim is backed up, incidentally, by real-life testimony from Kathy Wood, who in interviews has described her husband as behaving like "such a kid sometimes." The arrested development theme is strengthened by references to The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. There are more biographical details here, too. Ed tells us he is 31 and has just met the "missing piece" in his life, i.e. Kathy. So that places "Dreamer" in about 1955.

15. "Holy High Rollers" (3:47) - How do you pass up the story of Plan 9 from Outer Space, an outrageous sci-fi/horror fiasco sometimes called "the worst movie of all time," being financed by the goodhearted folks from a Baptist church? Simple. You don't. This is a rousing gospel number, the musical equivalent of a hyperkinetic tent revival. Presumably, the beginning of this song is sung from the POV of Ed's landlord and religious-minded financial backer, Ed Reynolds, who tries to sell his congregation on the idea of sinking their dough into Ed's flick so that they can use the profits to finance their own planned biopic of famed evangelist Billy Sunday. This is one of those times when a writer doesn't really need to invent anything to make the story of Ed Wood compelling. The truth is crazy enough on its own, thanks. My favorite part of "Holy High Rollers" is when Ed Wood himself takes the podium to address the congregation and almost makes Plan 9 sound like a sincere and profoundly religious work. Criswell, Ed claims, is a prophet. And the plot of his film is about a heavenly force that resurrects the dead. He's not being totally dishonest here, either. In the finished film, one of the aliens does speak reverently about God.

Bela Lugosi really is dead.

16. "Look Into My Eyes (Reprise)" (2:43) - You can't really build a modern-day musical without a reprise or two. The trick is not to overuse this technique so that it feels like rehashing ideas the audience has already heard. Luckily, Rick Tell is sparing in his use of reprises. He brings back Bela's signature song as the Hungarian screen legend disappears into the ether of time. Bela asks a fascinating rhetorical question: "Am I a mere reflection of the man I used to be?" I say "fascinating" because the actor is most famous for playing a character who does not cast a reflection. And this is not mere coincidence, as Tell makes sure to reference Dracula directly in the lyrics. The legendary actor may also be wracked with guilt in his final moments, as he seems to feel he is destined for Hell, not Heaven.

Sample lyric: "I am forsaken, forgotten and shunned, helpless like Dracula in the blazing sun."

17. "Method to the Madness" (4:18) - Here's a song which looks forward and backward. Backward in the sense that it quotes from a previous number, "Hollywood." Forward in the sense that it previews the melody which Tell has devised for the impending "Plan Nine." "Method to the Madness," true to its title, is more about the nuts-and-bolts of cheap filmmaking. We say Ed Wood is a "bad" director, but what specific technical traits does that entail? The song names a few: faulty continuity, overuse of stock footage, over-reliance on first takes, too many setups per day, etc. One of the observations here parallels a couplet from The Worst! "I'm no technician," says Eddie, "much more of a magician." Compare this to the words of the title track from Josh Alan Friedman's LP: "I'm no technician! Direction is the art of a mortician!" It's not that Tell was influenced by Friedman or was even aware of Friedman. Nevertheless, the life of Ed Wood led these two men to the same line and the same screwy sentiment, even though they were writing a decade apart.

Sample lyric: "No need to worry about the budget. I always find a way to fudge it!"

18. "When Love is Real" (2:43) - The softest, gooiest song in EW:TM is this sensitive love ballad, which sounds like it could have been recorded by the Carpenters. (That's a compliment; I love the Carpenters.) "When Love is Real" is a showcase number for Kathy Wood, who doesn't even merit so much as a mention in The Worst!, despite her vital importance to Ed's story. Here, Kathy stands by her man and lets him know it's okay if he dresses like a dame once in a while. She doesn't mind... much. Since it offers the opportunity for some powerhouse vocals, this is the kind of song which would be just perfect for an American Idol contestant to cover, except for lines like: "And if you sashay like a winner on Queen for a Day, that's okay!" You might have some trouble explaining that to the judging panel. But, honestly, this is no more outre than "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day)," a real-life Top 10 hit for Richard and Karen Carpenter in 1977. Wonder if Eddie heard that one before he died.

Sample lyric: "Wear six-inch heels. It's no big deal... when love is real."

19. "Walk Like a Zombie" (3:15) - And it's time to switch gears again! This is an out-and-out novelty number -- a zombie mambo! Lyrically, it's one of those dance songs which tell the listener what to do, step by step. It seems to be about Ed directing his actors to move like the living dead during the filming of Plan 9. At this juncture, I must invoke the arcane horror knowledge I gained from contributing to the late, great Mail Order Zombie podcast from 2008 to 2013. That show taught me (repeatedly) that there are two basic types of zombie: "voodoo" style and "George Romero" style. The former are dead people who have been granted a second, miserable "life" through voodoo so that they may act as mindless slaves and do the bidding of their still-living masters. The latter are blood-thirsty, cannibalistic creatures who rise from the grave (due to radiation, infection, or some other pseudo-scientific cause) and then aggressively hunt down the living because they are hungry and must feast on us to survive. The zombies of Plan 9 are definitely in the "voodoo"/"mindless slave" category, but Rick Tell treats them like the flesh-eating ghouls from George Romero's movies.

Sample lyric: "Right foot, left foot, bare your teeth.! Right foot, left foot, shuffle your feet!"

20. "Plan Nine" (5:22) - The longest song in EW:TM and, apart from "I'm Just Mad About Science," the most complicated and convoluted. "Plan Nine" begins with the indelible six-note signature taken from the title music from Plan 9 from Outer Space. "Method to the Madness" quoted this exact same passage a few tracks earlier. The song begins with Eddie on the cusp of Plan 9's premiere, a scenario also seen in Tim Burton's Ed Wood.  Poor, naive Eddie is certain that Plan 9 is the movie which will bring him lasting success, but we in the audience know better. This is, by my count, the third song to name check Orson Welles, by the way. After the opening segment with Ed at the premiere, "Plan Nine" segues into ominous techno music, and we get a song-ified, condensed version of the basic story. Pilot Jeff Trent of American Flight #812 gets his say in the matter, as do aliens Eros, Tanna, and the Ruler, plus air traffic controller "Mac" from the famed Burbank Tower.

Sample lyric: "Orson Welles had his Citizen Kane. Plan 9 from Outer Space will bring me critical acclaim!"

21. "The Golden Turkey" (1:59) - This is the surprisingly modest valedictory song from EW:TM, and it covers a potentially uncomfortable but necessary chapter in the Ed Wood saga. Arguably, the reason we are still studying Ed Wood and his movies today is Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards (1980). Without that book, which brought Plan 9 to widespread public attention, the fledgling Wood cult which had been struggling to life in the 1970s might never have gone supernova in the '80s. Therefore, it stands to reason that such byproducts of the Wood phenomenon as The Worst!, Ed Wood, and, yes, EW:TM owe their very existence to the Medveds.

In this song, Rick Tell imagines the book as an honest-to-goodness awards ceremony and has Ed Wood show up to claim his greatest "honor," i.e. the trophy for "worst movie director of all time." This is not entirely without real-life precedent, since such stars as Bill Cosby and Tom Green have insisted upon fetching their Golden Raspberry Awards in person, too. The difference is that Ed had been dead for two years when the book was first published. No matter. He gives his speech anyway, and he demonstrates the tough lesson he has learned about fame. Ed Wood's final monologue gives the show an almost Shakespearean sense of closure (here's what the story was all about and what you should take away from it), so I will end this review by quoting it directly:

For this award, I thank you all, but I don't know what to say.

I never thought that you would choose to honor me this way.

And though I had a strategy, my career has been a tragedy.

But I never gave up hope, so if you find yourself on the ropes,

You gotta hold your head up, reach for the stars!

Doesn't matter if your spaceship crash lands on Mars.

I chased my dream. I captured fame. 

Throughout the world, they know my name!

They say it's an unwritten law to be careful of what you wish for.

And though I escaped oblivion, it was a blessing and a curse,

For I am remembered. Yes, I am remembered.

I am famous for being the worst.

In two weeks: Folks, I have been procrastinating far too long. The ghost of a certain film has haunted me for months now, and I have not yet heeded its call. Yes, if there is one major, glaring gap in my exhaustive and exhausting coverage of Ed Wood's career, it is that I have thus far neglected a strange motion picture which was produced in 1998 (with an all-star cast, no less!) and based on a script that Eddie started writing back in the 1950s and held onto even during his darkest days in the 1970s. The fact that the embattled screenplay survived at all is nothing short of miraculous, and the fact that it was eventually made into a real, honest-to-goodness motion picture twenty years after its author's death is likewise improbable. So I have decided to take this film for a test drive and deliver unto you my judgment of it. Along the way, I'll probably also be discussing why this particular bit of Wood-iana disappeared from public view nearly as soon as it had debuted. Make sure to be back here in two weeks when I (finally) review I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.