A new book about (among other things) the writing career of Ed Wood.
"Dear sir or madam, would you read my book?"
-The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"
About a year ago, by my estimation, I was approached by the editors of an upcoming book about pulp fiction to contribute a chapter about Edward D. Wood, Jr. I would have gladly done so for free, but (happily) this was a modestly-paying gig -- the only time, in fact, I have ever been paid to write about Ed Wood. Trust me, it doesn't come anywhere near what I've spent on books, DVDs, posters, and (let's not forget) a trip to New York City as part of this project. But, still, it's nice to be asked, you know? At the suggestion of the aforementioned editors, Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette, I focused my attention on Eddie's 1967 girl-gang potboiler, Devil Girls. I put quite a bit of work into the resulting chapter, but I never mentioned it here because I didn't know the current state of the book. Well, now I am happy to announce that Beat Girls, Love Tribes, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950-1980 is due to be released on November 10, 2015 from Verse Chorus Press. That link in the previous sentence will take you to the book's Amazon page. I get nothing from the sale of the book, by the way. I'm not even sure I get a free copy. We'll see.
Incidentally, because I'm in the mood for some shameless self-promotion, here's some other Joe Blevins-related crap fine quality merchandise you can find on Amazon:
Just got home yesterday from Indiana, o my brothers and only friends. I was there visiting my sister and her family for the Memorial Day weekend. My dad came down from Michigan, so I got to see him, too. There's not much to do in this portion of Indiana, so we watched many hours of television and consumed mass quantities of starches, sugars, and fats. That helped pass the time. We also got out to the movies a couple of times. Finally caught up with The Avengers: Age of Ultron (a solid, if by-the-book superhero flick; a little more self-serious and hence maybe not as fun as the first one) and Mad Max: Fury Road (an expectation-shattering revelation; I may have to see it again before it leaves theaters). One of my favorite rituals of these family get-togethers is reading the comics with my niece and nephew. This time, I was able to introduce them to the pleasures of Garfield Minus Garfield, the dadaist experimental comic which takes normal Garfield dailies and simply removes the title character, thus revealing the fat orange cat's pitiful owner, Jon Arbuckle, as the sad, twitchy lunatic he's always been. We read the original Garfield, too, and I found one which would make a perfect candidate for Garfield Minus Garfield. So before those guys could get their paws on it, I did my own version. You can see it above. Enjoy, and I'll catch you further along down the trail.
UPDATE: Garfield Minus Garfield did, in fact, publish its own version of this strip, several days after I posted mine. But they dropped Jon's third-panel word balloon, which to me makes it less funny. Better that he desperately plead to nobody. Advantage: Joe.
Ed Wood dons eye shadow and lipstick for his role in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
"It's amazing. I mean, here the guy is a complete failure in our way of thinking. Made schlock pictures, you know. And suddenly, he's famous. It's amazing."
-Director Joe Robertson on the career of Ed Wood
Ed Wood did his fair share of acting.
Is it possible that Ed Wood missed his true calling, but just barely? Consider this assessment made by his biographer, Rudolph Grey, in a conversation with filmmaker Frank Henenlotter in 1994: "What many people don't realize is that Ed was a pretty good actor. He did have an extensive stage background. He did a lot of stage work when he first arrived in Hollywood. I think Ed could've gotten a lot of work as an actor if he had really pursued it, but I don't think that's what he really wanted to do."
Ed certainly had the looks for it, at least in the late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s, before alcoholism had fully taken its ghastly toll on his face and form. Numerous actresses who worked with him during those years, including Valda Hansen and Maila Nurmi, have commented upon his old-fashioned, Errol Flynn-esque handsomeness. And, obviously, he convinced at least two women -- Norma McCarty and Kathy O'Hara -- to marry him during the 1950s. A third paramour, Dolores Fuller, never actually tied the knot with Ed but did leave her own husband, Donald Kenneth Fuller, for him. So Eddie must have had the charisma of a leading man in those days.
But did Ed have the acting chops to go with it? It is my assertion that he did. Obviously, his biggest screen role was in the autobiographical Glen or Glenda? (1953), and during my many viewings of that film, I have been struck time and again by how genuine and vulnerable Eddie is in the title role(s). Viewers tend to be so distracted by that film's wildly improbable dialogue, ludicrous plot, and jerry-rigged construction that they miss out on Ed Wood's true conviction at the center of it.
Take, for instance, the scene in which cross-dresser Glen (Ed Wood) confides in his friend Johnny (Charlie Crafts), a fellow transvestite and, thus, one of the few people on earth who could possibly understand his troubles. Glen is dithering, Hamlet-like, about whether or not to tell his emasculating "secret" to his fiancee, Barbara (Dolores Fuller). In the process, he delivers the following speech, the closest thing to the "to be or not to be" soliloquy in the Wood canon:
"My mind's in a muddle, like in a thick fog. I can't make sense to myself sometimes. I thought I could stop wearing these things. I tried, honestly I tried. I haven't had a stitch of them on for nearly two weeks until tonight. Then I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to put them on or go out of my mind. I'm afraid I'll lose her. I don't want that to happen because... I really love her."
The "muddled mind" monologue has been one of the most frequently-chided passages in any of Wood's films, even turning up in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, but the more I watch Glenda, the more I believe what Ed is saying here. He really does seem like a confused young man with a difficult, high-stakes decision to make. In fact, Glenda is the most emotionally-affecting of Ed Wood's films, and a big part of that is Wood's own lead performance.
Eddie's dialogue is not easy to deliver and make sound believable. Luckily, throughout his career, Wood worked with a few actors, including Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson, Kenne Duncan, Rene Bond, and even Criswell, whose outsized screen personalities carry them along, no matter what they're saying or doing. But many more actors, veterans and newcomers alike, were defeated by the stilted, arrhythmic lines Eddie gave them to recite.
In the softcore erotic films Ed Wood co-scripted for Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s, Harvey Shane (aka Forman Shane) seems at ease most of the time, but Steve's other regulars, such as Angela Carnon and Terri Johnson, are hopelessly adrift. Performances like these make you realize how good an actor Ed was in comparison.
After Glen or Glenda?, however, acting was never more than a very occasional sideline for Edward D. Wood, Jr. His stage career, the one he'd formally trained for after serving in the Marines, ended when he went into the picture-making business, with the possible exception of 1954's The Bela Lugosi Revue.
As a director, he didn't cast himself nearly as often as he could have, preferring minor walk-on parts to major speaking roles. His gonzo, cross-dressing turn as broken-down madam "Alecia" in Take It Out in Trade is the exception which proves the rule.
Still in all, author David C. Hayes dutifully devotes a chapter of Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to Eddie's talents as a thespian, underused as they might have been. "Ed Wood... the Actor?" (credited to Hayes' jokey alter ego, Hayden Davis, PhD) makes the following modest claim: "Ed Wood Jr. was a good, effective character actor (with a few exceptions)." In building his case, Hayes concentrates on Wood's performance in Glenda, of course, but also details Eddie's late-career acting gigs in other directors' films (e.g. his triple role in Steve Apostolof's Fugitive Girls), as well as the cameos Wood awarded to himself in his own movies (e.g. a nameless tough tussling with Connie Brooks in The Sinister Urge).
Besides Wood himself, the filmmaker who used Ed Wood most prominently as an actor, for better or worse, was independent cinema legend Joseph F. Robertson. And not so coincidentally, it is one of Robertson's films which concerns us this week, my friends...
Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970)
Joe Robertson's film was released as The Sensuous Wife on VHS by Private Screenings.
Mrs. Stone by any other name...
Alternate titles: The film was retitled The Sensuous Wife when it was released on VHS by Private Screenings in 1981. In the current existing version, this new title has been obviously and clumsily inserted into the film. It has also been spotted under the title The Very Sensuous Wife. The West German title, Heisse Fingerspiele, translates as (not kidding) Hot Fingering. I hasten to point out that fingering is not exceptionally essential to the plot of this motion picture, whatever its title may be.
Availability: Though Mrs. Stone's Thing never made it to DVD under its original title, old copies of the Sensuous Wife VHS tape are still available on Amazon. Expect to pay about a hundred bucks, though. Sorry. It's also being sold on iOffer. Good luck.
The backstory: The legendary, three-decade career of exploitation filmmaker Joseph F. "Papa Joe" Robertson (1925-2001) is one I have already covered when I reviewed Love Feast (1969), a softcore film directed by Robertson and written by and starring Ed Wood. Though Joe and Ed did not join forces until the late 1960s, the former had been in the motion picture game for some time. In a few vital ways, the two men led parallel lives. Like Wood, Robertson was born in the state of New York in the mid-1920s, fought as a Marine in World War II, and wound up making low-budget independent feature films once he got back home. Eddie, however, had grown up with a movie camera in his hand, thanks to his father, and started trying to make his own movies professionally as early as 1948. Joe, on the other hand, didn't get into the picture game until the Swinging Sixties.
Neither Wood nor Robertson started out in pornography, furthermore, but both gravitated towards the genre because of its promise of quick profits with low overhead costs. In the early days of his movie career, Joe Robertson produced a trio of drive-in perennials, all non-pornographic: the sci-fi/horror films The Slime People and The Crawling Hand (both 1963) and the James Bond knockoff Agent from H.A.R.M. (1966). As near as I can tell, Joe Robertson's Nixon-era shift to skin flicks coincided with his meeting Edward D. Wood, Jr. Coincidence?
In a retrospective interview with documentarian Ted Newsom in the 1990s, Robertson talked about meeting Ed Wood. Ed's military history, it turns out, was pivotal in their bonding:
Mrs. Stone's Thing director Joseph F. Robertson
"I had done a lot of films, and I was working. And then, as a hobby, I had a very big bar called the Surf Girl. And one night, [Ed] came in, and he was okay. I mean, he wasn't in drag, and he looked pretty good. He didn't look good, but he looked okay. And we had mutual friends that introduced me to him. And he was in the Marine Corps. I was in the Marine Corps. And so we had a certain empathy. We felt for each other on that portion of it. Semper fi. And we talked a lot. And he was quite decorated. And then I got friendly with him.
Robertson told Newsom that these evenings of cross-dressing revelry at the Surf Girl occurred over the course of "three or four years," circa 1966 to 1968, and did coincide with Joe's entrance into softcore adult filmmaking. Robertson was quick to point out, however, that the sex in his early films was "simulated" and "very, very mild," unlike current skin flicks. He knew of which he spoke: At the time of the interview, circa 1994, Robertson was still writing, producing, and directing X-rated feature films as "Adele Robbins," a nom de guerre he picked up in the late 1970s, several years after his association with Ed Wood ended.
In retrospect, considering his Marine past and attendant machismo, Joe Robertson displayed remarkable tolerance for Ed Wood's gender-blurring eccentricities. Rather than shrinking from Ed's transvestism, Joe made it part of the act. In total, Wood and Robertson made three films together, and Eddie dresses in drag in all of them.
Accounts differ as to who did what on these movies. In the Newsom interview, Joe Robertson claimed that he wrote the screenplays for all three of these motion pictures. ("[Ed] didn't [write] for me. I'm a writer, too.") While Joe's sole authorship of Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970) is not in doubt, most sources -- including Ed Wood's own writing resume -- suggest that Eddie himself wrote both Love Feast (aka The Photographer) and Misty (aka Nympho Cycler). Robertson did, however, acknowledge Eddie's writing talent or at least his writing productivity. "Very prolific writer," he told Newsom. "Tremendous. He could turn things out all night and just do a whole script in five or six hours." Nevertheless, Robertson basically thought of Eddie as a charity case, as he explained to Ted Newsom:
"Because of our friendship, I had him in two pictures that I have. Three pictures, actually, that he made for me. He did one in Mrs. Stone's Thing. He did a little funny shtick. That was a big picture. And then I had him in Misty, another one we did, which we can't find, by the way. And then he did The Photographer, which Rhino is distributing. I wrote it. He was the actor in it."
An ex-Marine was simply doing a favor for another, less successful ex-Marine. "At that point," Joe said, Ed Wood "was downhill." But even though Eddie was in physical, financial, and professional decline during its making, Mrs. Stone's Thing was nevertheless a major production for Joe Robertson. While Joe couldn't pin down an exact budget, he pointed out to Ted Newsom that Mrs. Stone's Thing was shot on pricey 35mm film, while Misty and Love Feast were only 16mm. For Joe, Mrs. Stone was an epic. "They had a hundred people in the cast!"
The existing print carries an unmistakably proud credit: "Written & Directed by Joseph F. Robertson." Maybe every low-budget director dreams, if only fleetingly, of being Cecil B. DeMille for a day. This might have been Joe Robertson's The Ten Commandments. It does bear some resemblance to that film's notorious "golden calf" sequence.
Ironically, Robertson would be denied proper directing credit for two of the three films he made with Ed Wood. Rhino Video claimed Eddie directed The Photographer, which it opportunistically renamed Pretty Models All in a Row, while Alpha Blue Archives touted Ed Wood as the director of Nympho Cycler. I don't believe that Rhino or ABA were trying to cheat or shortchange Joe Robertson; the movies were simply more marketable if Ed Wood were listed as their director. In his chat with Ted Newsom, Joe suggested that he may have voluntarily ceded the directing credit to Ed Wood on Love Feast. Maybe it was karmic payback for misspelling his buddy's name as "Ed Woods" in the hand-drawn, hippy-dippy end credits for Mrs. Stone's Thing.
Poor Eddie was credited as "(Mr.) Ed Woods" in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
Victor Rich and Karen Johnson.
As of this writing,Mrs. Stone's Thing is the only one of the Wood/Robertson films not to make it to DVD. To this day, it remains accessible only to collectors and die-hards. Perhaps that's because Eddie's role in it is fleeting and entirely peripheral to the main story. In contrast, Wood was the lead in Love Feast and the husband of the main character in Misty.
Briefly, the plot of Mrs. Stone's Thing revolves around George Stone (one-and-doner Victor Rich), a middle-aged businessman who reluctantly brings his naive, stay-at-home wife Martha (Karen Johnson, also a one-film wonder) to an orgy at the home of a business associate (Ron Dyer, who also appeared in 1969's Dr. Masher with Alice Friedland). Victor Rich and Karen Johnson are the actual stars here.
The film is really about how this wild get-together puts the Stones' marriage to the test. Ed is merely a guest at the party, and he doesn't even show up until about the 30-minute mark. When he does, he essentially plays himself: a hard-drinking, cross-dressing writer. As with the other Robertson films, Eddie does not look healthy here. His face and body are both badly bloated, and his complexion is fish-belly pale. For the benefit of Robertson's camera, Ed clumsily but bravely dons female attire onscreen. With some effort, he squeezes himself into control-top pantyhose, but his booze-filled gut will not be contained. Later in the film, he puts on eye shadow and lipstick and makes faces at the camera. Tongue firmly in cheek as always, author David C. Hayes describes Ed Wood's "smaller" but "no less commanding" role in Mrs. Stone's Thing in gleefully unappetizing yet somehow triumphant terms.
"Wood played Ed, a transvestite writer of smut novels, that attended an orgy party. Unfazed by the rampant sex around him, Ed searched through the house until he found the mistress' bedroom. Changing into a dress, hose and blouse Wood reminds us of his ever-adaptable acting style. At that point, Ed the actor was obviously suffering from the DTs, and shaking like a leaf. He persevered, though, and with shaking hands, funny 'actor' voice and bad girdle jokes Wood applied lipstick. In some ways this can be a testament to the younger actors of today. To the Downeys, Slaters and Sutherlands... chemical abuse is no reason to give a crappy performance."
Most of Eddie's fans have, for obvious reasons of availability, not seen Mrs. Stone's Thing. In their 1994 Cult Movies magazine interview, biographer Rudolph Grey and filmmaker Frank Henenlotter discuss whether this is a good thing. They differ, as you will see, on whether this softccore film is degrading to Ed Wood's image. The two experts also compare Mrs. Stone to the other Robertson films.
Jack King and Nancy Holliday in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
FH: Ed also plays a small role in Robertson's Mrs. Stone's Thing in which he's again in drag. And one of the things that's interesting is that, before Ed's scene, Nancy Holliday, the actress playing his fat wife, talked about Ed as both a transvestite and a prolific writer. She says, "Just because he wears women's clothes around the house, doesn't mean there's anything queer about him..."
RG: Right. The fat woman and the fat guy are in the pool and she's talking about her husband Ed. And Jack King, the fat guy, says Ed's kinda weird and she says something to the effect of, "Everybody has their hang-ups, haven't they? It's all a matter of perspective." Then she says he's really quite brilliant and wrote 28 novels last year.
FH: Ed looks like he's having a good time in that one but, again, seems juiced to the gills. He even comments on how much booze he's had. He also ad-libs a couple of lines which he finds really hilarious and seems to be staring at someone off set as he cracks up.
RG: Well, I find his appearance in that one somewhat depressing. It's almost as if he's being exploited.
FH: He probably was but I get the sense that Ed's also an exhibitionist. I mean, when he's in drag he loves showing off.
RG: Right.
FH: And I don't see where his part in Mrs. Stone's Thing is any less depressing than him licking the boot at the end of Love Feast...
RG: I see your point. But Love Feast seems to be more of an Ed Wood type movie. He wrote Love Feast. I'm not sure he had much to do with Mrs. Stone's Thing. I mean, it just looks like he was drunk, and he's just making an appearance, and he doesn't have much control over the movie or the situation.
FH: You'll notice that although his character is supposed to stumble into the bedroom and find the women's clothing, he's already wearing high heels...
RG: Yeah...
The aforementioned scene involving Nancy Holliday and Jack King, who frolic in an oversized bathtub (not a swimming pool), is one of the most memorably unhinged moments in Mrs. Robertson's Thing. The issue of "who wrote what?" almost becomes irrelevant because long passages of this movie, including this one, seem to be improvised or semi-improvised. In a later scene, Holliday and King sneak away from the party to the mansion's game room and try to have sex on two billiard tables pushed together. It's obvious that the two actors are ad-libbing most of their lines and desperately stalling for time. Judging by what's on the screen, I doubt any of Ed Wood's scenes were tightly scripted. At most, Joe Robertson might have been working from a vague outline. Eddie appears to be winging it most of the time.
In case you never get to see the film, here's a complete breakdown of the Ed Wood content in Mrs. Stone's Thing. Remember, most of this is interspersed with scenes of the party already in progress.
25:36 - Before we ever meet Ed's character, we are introduced to his better half. Ed's roly-poly wife Nancy (Nancy Holliday) is blatantly cheating on him with similarly-zaftig Jack (Jack King). They canoodle in a tub in what looks like a very fancy, ornately-decorated bathroom. Among other things, they talk about Ed's cross-dressing and his writing career. (See Frank Henenlotter and Rudolph Grey's comments above.)
30:41 - Ed's first appearance is in what seems to be the master bedroom, where he has secluded himself away from the other guests. Wearing a drab, long-sleeved brown shirt and matching trousers, he takes a moment to regard a squawking parrot. Then he sits down on the bed and sniffs a pair of panties, all while squinting and rubbing his face. He looks around to see if anyone's watching, then takes off his pants and shirt.
31:39 - Now nude except for pantyhose, Ed steps into a pair of matronly-looking white panties.
32:55 - Ed now dons a hot pink brassiere and admires himself in the mirror. At this point, a blonde-haired woman walks into the bedroom, sees Ed, and becomes goggle-eyed in horror.
33:29 - Ed is modestly covering himself up when a shirtless man walks into the bedroom. It's a fellow we recognize from earlier in the movie as George Stone's friend and coworker. "What do we have here?" says the man. Ed giggles and shyly turns away. The man reassures him: "That's all right! You look nice!" "Oh, come on!" says Ed, humbly. Gesturing to some other clothes on the bed, the man suggests: "Why don't you try the rest of them on?"
34:02 - As the shirtless man looks on admiringly, Ed holds a black and grey dress in front of him. "It looks cute!" enthuses the man. "Oh, this is crazy!" replies Ed. "What would my wife say?" "She'll never find out," says the man. "And that gang downstairs?" asks Ed. "I'll never tell 'em," the man says. "Put it on!" "Why not?" reasons Ed. "I'm game for anything after all that booze you had down there!" When the man tells Ed he looks "like my wife" in the dress, Ed replies: "Good Lord! If she's this fat, we don't want to worry about that, do we?"
34:35 - "I didn't know you were this cute, you know that?" enthuses the man. Ed says, "I need a girdle." But he fits into the dress anyway. The man then advises him, "Look in the mirror! Isn't that something?" Ed asks the parrot for a review: "What do you think about that, Polly?" Turning back to his human guest, Ed says, "Let's go get another one!"
42:22 - Still wearing the dress, Ed runs his hands up and down his legs in the hosiery. Then he looks in the mirror and squints while applying lipstick. He slips a pink satin robe over the dress and again admires his reflection. He twirls, tousles his hair, and strikes "model" poses. But then Ed's enormous wife, Nancy, enters the room, and Ed runs for cover. "Uh oh! You've had it doc!" says the parrot. "Oh, the Age of Discovery!" yells the wife. "Have I got a great idea! Have I got a girl for you!" She then drags a reluctant Ed out of the bedroom by his arm.
43:15 - Ed and Nancy are now downstairs, in the thick of the party. Nancy says to one blonde-wigged party-goer: "I would like you to meet my husband." This mysterious stranger turns around and reveals himself to be... another man in drag! Ed rolls his eyes. "Oh, how very fascinating!" says the second cross-dresser, as he sizes Ed up.
A Mia Coco pictorial.
Like its two uninspiring leads, most of the actors in Mrs. Stone's Thing had never been in a movie before this and would never make another one after this.
Jack King is the obvious exception, Perhaps best known for his turn as a doomed grandfather in The Creeping Terror (1964), this distinctive character actor brought his round physique, gruff voice, and bushy beard to a number of low-budget films, nearly all of them pornographic, from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s. Ed Wood fans will know him, for instance, as the storyteller -- a sort of Cro Magnon Criswell -- from Ed De Priest's One Million AC/DC (1969), where he was also scantily clad but seemingly not self-conscious about his appearance. (In Mrs. Stone, King's weight becomes an issue when he tries to mount Nancy Holliday, but neither actor seems terribly bothered by it.) Joe Robertson cast Jack King again in A Touch of Sweden (1971), just a year after Mrs. Stone. And Pete Perry (who directed 1959's Revenge of the Virgins) used Jack in The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet (1969).
Meanwhile, viewers familiar with Love Feast may recognize busty, flirtatious Mia Coco. A prominent pinup model in the 1960s and 1970s, she was the lone African-American in the Love Feast cast, and she turns up as an aptly-named "scene stealer" in Mrs. Stone. At one point, she even wriggles like a snake across the prone bodies of the partygoers.
The other name which immediately jumps out from the credits of Mrs. Stone's Thing is that of Hal Guthu, who acted as the director of photography, just as he did on Love Feast. Guthu was better known as an agent for nude models and porn actresses, so I'm guessing he might have supplied some of the female talent on (abundant) display here, including Ms. Coco.
The film's second director of photography was Robert "Bob" Maxwell, who was a very busy cameraman and gaffer in '60s and '70s cult cinema. His credits include Orgy of the Dead (1965), Girl in Gold Boots (1968), and the revolutionary Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). Born on Christmas Day in 1923, Maxwell was just a few months older than Ed Wood. Sadly, they both died at the age of 54 in December 1978. Bob outlived Ed by just twelve days.
On a happier note, Mrs. Stone's Thing acts as yet another accidental documentary -- one of many in Ed Wood's filmography -- of what Los Angeles, California looked like during the Laugh-In years. Joe Robertson shot a lot of location footage for this film, and he managed to capture some now-long-gone landmarks in the process. During the title sequence, for example, we see actor Victor Rich walking through downtown L.A.'s Century City Mall in pursuit of a sexy young thing with an admirable disdain for underwear. His travels take him past the 55-story headquarters of Security Pacific National Bank, which later became Bank of America Plaza.
He also saunters past the impressive-from-the-outside Century House Restaurant, which was also glimpsed in 1967's A Guide for the Married Man. A website called Old L.A. Restuarants called the Century House "a decent place to grab a bite if you were shopping over there but that's about it."
The original George and Martha.
The viewing experience: Like surveying the ruins of Pompeii after that doomed ancient city was buried in lava, its citizens uncannily preserved just as they were before Vesuvius blew its stack. Mrs. Stone's Thing, from its slangy title onward, is unmistakably the product of a lost era.
This was back when middle-aged people, like the ones largely in charge of the motion picture industry, were desperately trying to figure out the so-called counterculture so as to subdue it, exploit it, or both.
This film might make interesting viewing for superfans of Mad Men, as it also concerns liquor-swilling, suit-wearing executives awash in the Age of Aquarius. This film's lead character, George Stone, could even be a refugee from that departed AMC series. He's an arrogant, womanizing businessman who wears ascots and keeps his silver hair immaculately groomed -- a strutting peacock of a man. His views toward women, predictably, languish in a pre-feminist hinterland; George likely takes his cues directly from Hugh Hefner in his dealings with the fairer sex. He expects his wife, Martha, to remain faithful to him and stay at home, mixing his martinis, while he dashes off to bacchanals which would make Caligula blush.
In other words, George Stone is no hippie, yet he wants to reap the sensual pleasures -- namely, casual sex with attractive and anonymous young women -- of the hippie lifestyle. If there is a common thread in the three Wood/Robertson films, it is of the older generation essentially cannibalizing the younger one. Incidentally, I don't think it's a mere coincidence that the husband and wife in this movie are named George and Martha. These monikers remind us not only of George and Martha Washington, the Father and First Lady of our country, but also of George and Martha from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which Mike Nichols turned into an acclaimed film in 1966 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Set mainly at the lavish estate of a free-spending tycoon, Mrs. Stone's Thing centers around a wild party which quickly evolves/devolves into a full-scale orgy. Sex and drugs are in full evidence here, and the third component of the hippie holy trinity, rock 'n' roll, is present in the form of a fuzzy-haired, bongo-bashing acid rock combo whose repertoire includes an instrumental cover of "Johnny B. Goode."
Yet all of this is ostensibly being done in the name of commerce. George is attending this event in order to make business contracts. Getting loaded and screwing flower children are just components of his job. Mrs. Stone's Thing takes place firmly within the territory of the Establishment, not the counterculture. The dozens of nude, gyrating young people in attendance seem to have been rented and bused in especially for the occasion. Do they know or care that they are on enemy turf?
Russ Meyer favorite Princess Livingston
More than anything, Mrs. Stone's Thing reminded me of Russ Meyer's contemporaneous Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which was also chiefly set at the plush estate of an eccentric, party-happy millionaire. The two films even share a piece of prominently-used stock music -- a bouncy, harpsichord-accented twist rocker which could only have come from the 1960s. (It sounds like something from Hullaballoo or Shindig!)
Like Beyond the Valley, Mrs. Stone allows us to eavesdrop on a ridiculously over-the-top, sex-and-drug-fueled Hollywood party attended by lots of young, well-tanned "beautiful people," along with a few grotesques and eccentrics for good measure. Ed Wood, I'm afraid, is intended as one of the grotesques, as are Nancy Holliday and Jack King, who share his inconsequential sub-sub-subplot. They serve essentially the same function for Robertson as the cackling, toothless hag Princess Livingston did for Meyer. (Meyer cast Livingston four times, including Beyond the Valley. She died in 1976.) They're there to remind us just how absolutely anarchic this party is. Anything goes, baby! Just look what kinds of freaks we let through the door! Whee!
This is not to say that Robertson's film was influenced by Russ Meyer. Joe Robertson might never have even seen one of Meyer's films. But I'll be damned if Mrs. Stone's Thing doesn't seem like it was edited together from footage Meyer left on the cutting room floor while making Beyond the Valley. George Stone is certainly the kind of square-jawed man's man Meyer used repeatedly. (Meyer regular Charles Napier would have been perfect for the role.)
And Robertson often uses oddball camera angles and frenetic editing in Mrs. Stone, just as Meyer did in Beyond the Valley. When Mia Coco slinks through the party in Robertson's movie, furthermore, it reminded me of Haji wearing little more than black body paint as the "Cat Lady" in Beyond the Valley. Even the absurdly old-fashioned ending of Mrs. Stone's Thing, in which George and Martha decide to forget all this "orgy" nonsense and start a family, runs parallel to the utterly square epilogue and "triple wedding"conclusion of Beyond the Valley.
An upsetting flashback from Mrs. Stone's Thing.
The main difference between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Mrs. Stone's Thing is one of tone. Meyer's film, which was scripted by famed critic Roger Ebert, is slyly self-aware, deliberately outrageous, and steeped in parody, irony, satire, and real-world cultural references ranging from Lawrence Welk to Muhammad Ali. Robertson's film has virtually none of these attributes.
Irony was never Ed Wood's strong suit, and that much-abused word does not even seem to be in Joe Roberton's cinematic vocabulary. Both Beyond and Mrs. Stone contain scenes of strong sexuality and violence, sometimes in alarming combination, but I believe such moments in Mrs. Stone's Thing are meant to be taken seriously and at face value. In Meyer's film, in contrast, everything's a put-on, including the Nazi bartender (who appears in full uniform at one point) and the musclebound hunk who is brutally decapitated by a vengeful transsexual. One potentially-disturbing subplot in Beyond the Valley concerns a young lesbian (Cynthia Myers) who is raped -- off-camera -- by a male friend (David Gurian), who in turn is driven to attempt suicide. It sounds grim, but the film treats these events like everything else in the script, i.e. as stylized, soap opera-style camp.
The characters in Beyond the Valley may take themselves and their problems quite seriously, but the movie doesn't. It's analogous to the treatment of Adam West and Burt Ward in the '60s Batman TV show. We know the show is a goof even if they don't.
On the other hand, Mrs. Stone's Thing has a dark subplot about a lesbian party guest (Toni Demoulin) who was raped by her father (Reb Rebel) as an adolescent and consequently grows up to be a rapist herself, forcing herself on another female party guest. For reasons of his own, Joe Robertson includes numerous, mood-killing flashbacks to this poor woman's terrible childhood. We witness, first-hand, the rape and abuse of both the mother and the daughter at the hands of the father. And then we have to watch as the now-grown woman continues the cycle of abuse with a new victim. Unlike a Russ Meyer film, there is not a hint of parody or irony in any of this. This material is played as strictly traumatic and upsetting. What this stuff is doing in an erotic film is beyond me.
And yet, despite all this, the overall mood of Mrs. Stone's Thing is celebratory, up to and including Ed Wood's cameo. Some awful things may be happening in the back bedrooms here, but otherwise this party seems like a lot of fun. This house has everything: a swimming pool with a water slide, a deluxe game room, body painting, plenty of colorful beach towels you can use in light S&M scenarios, a wisecracking parrot, one of those hanging wicker chairs (like the one in Bloomer Girls), hordes of attractive naked people, a full assortment of drugs and alcohol, a very decent rock combo, and even a monkey! And you can make important business contacts here, too? Who wouldn't want to go to this party?
Like Joseph F. Robertson's other films of the period, Misty (1971) and The Love Feast (1969), Mrs. Stone's Thing has a repetitive yet insidiously catchy theme song that semi-successfully summarizes the plot of the movie. In this case, it's a "bubblegum psychedelic" ditty called "Mrs. Stone Wants To Swing" by a group called Kent & The Candidates. Consisting of Kent Sprague, Mo Rodgers, Reginal Douglas, and Walter P. Smith, this group existed from 1967 to 1971. They released singles on several labels, including Liberty and Double Shot. Kent wrote for other prominent acts of the era, including Three Dog Night and Brenton Wood.
"Mrs. Stone Wants to Swing" reminds me of Donovan's "Mellow Yellow," mixed with The Beatles' "Getting Better," The Turtles' "Happy Together," and any number of Monkees B-sides. If this whets your appetite, there's an entire compilation called The Best of Kent and the Candidates.
NEXT: How low can you go? It's a matter of opinion, of course, but there are arguably few assignments in filmmaking lower than directing pornographic loops. But that is one of the many odd jobs Ed Wood took in the 1970s, when feature film gigs were hard to come by and even his short stories and novels weren't paying the bills. These types of films might seem to be extremely ephemeral. After all, who would think to preserve them? And yet, miraculously, some of Ed Wood's X-rated loops have survived to this day and age, and I am now preparing to review them for your benefit. Join me back here in two weeks, and together we will enter the realm ofSwedish Erotica.
An incredible optical illusion. Just keep staring at the black dot and amazing things will happen, I swear!
Stare at it. Stare at the little black dot in the center of the picture. That's right. Don't look at anything else. Just keep staring at the little black dot. Whatever happens. Whatever the cost. Babies will be born. Old people will die. Empires will rise and fall. But you won't even notice any of that shit, because you've got a job to do, and that job is staring at the little black dot.
Don't look at the faces of your family. They'll only distract you with their so-called "love." Don't look at the depressing headlines about genocide and famine and man's inhumanity to man. Those'll only get in your way. And for god's sake, don't look inward at your own miserable dung heap of a soul. This is no time for introspection. No, this is a time to stare at a little black dot between two flowery-looking rainbow things on the goddamned Internet. This is an amazing optical illusion, maybe the most amazing one ever, and you are this close to ruining it with your petty personal bullshit. Do something right for a change. Stare at the little black dot. Stare some more. Stare harder. Harder! Stare until you become the little black dot.
There. That's it. Good job. You're doing great. Keep it up.
Keep staring.
Keep staring.
Keep....
THERE!
Did you see it? Did you witness the miracle? Did you, a grown-ass adult human being with a functioning brain, manage to successfully follow the one simple instruction you were given? If so, congratulations. By this time, the optical illusion has revealed itself to you, and you are still reeling from its effects. Wasn't that incredible? Wasn't that the most amazing sensory experience you've ever had in your life? I'm sure you'll agree that it was worth the time and effort to stare at the little black dot. Better than any orgasm, and with no messy cleanup afterward. Better than any drug, and it's all totally legal. Can't nobody narc on this stash... 'cause this stash is in your mind! You may never stare into the face of God, but now you've come as close to that as any human ever could. From this moment on, your life has meaning.
Some of you, having gotten the illusion to work properly, will be tempted to do it again. And again. And again and again and again. I must warn against this. This optical illusion is so powerful, so awesome, so paradigm-shifting that it's best just to do it once and walk away. So go. Live your life. Talk a walk. Get some fresh air. Try to forget what you've seen here. Otherwise, you'll likely spend the rest of your life chasing a single, five-second-long high. Your brain, already weak and feeble, will completely liquefy. We're talking Tapioca City. You'll end up on the streets or worse. I have a cousin who did the little black dot thing twice. Just twice. Now, he's living in a group home and making brooms for 17 cents an hour. I visit him every other weekend.
On the other hand, if you didn't get the optical illusion to work, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Either you have the mental acuity of a doorknob, or God just plain hates you. It's probably a combination of both. So that's what you get out of this experience: the knowledge that God hates your guts. Right now, Jesus, Moses, Allah, Buddha, Mohammed, and Tom Cruise are probably taking turns saying rude things about you. I guess you'll just have to live with that knowledge.
Aren't optical illusions the best? I mean, just the best?
Original by Karen Moy and Joe Giella. Drastic rewrite by your humble blogger.
I'm working on some dandy new content for this blog, but in the meantime, I wanted to post something new here. This is another one of my rewrites of a newspaper comic. I took today's Mary Worth and added my own dialogue to it, changing the plot ever so slightly. Currently, the storyline revolves around a recently-reuinted couple, Adam and Terry. Disturbingly, Adam moved into Terry's building without telling her. She was shocked and horrified at first, but now they're sort of dating again. In this episode, they've just been hot air ballooning and are enjoying a nice lunch afterwards. Terry clearly wants to take things slowly, but Adam is already talking marriage. I thought that was funny, so I made the dumb thing you see above. Enjoy.
I've done similar jokes about the high-pressure guys in Mary Worth before. Here's an example from a few years back. I called this one "The Patient Man."
The cover of a soon-to-be-released book about Ed Wood's movies.
NOTE: It had been my intention today to present my findings on Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970), an extraordinary film whose cast features Mr. Edward D. Wood, Jr. However, some heavier-than-expected work commitments have forced me to reschedule that posting. Rather than shortchange Mrs. Stone's Thing with a sloppy or incomplete analysis, I have decided to postpone that article one week. It will appear in this space on May 20, 2015. In the meantime, I have accumulated a few bits of Ed Wood-related news which I wanted to present to you. Please enjoy. - J.B.
Try as he might,our boy Eddie just can't stay out of the news for long. You might think that it would be easy keeping up with a guy who's been dead since December 1978, but that's just not the case with Mr. Edward Davis Wood, Jr. You see, dear readers, Eddie's is a restless spirit which the afterlife simply cannot contain. That's the only explanation I can offer for the man's remarkably busy post-death career. The actress Valda Hansen, who sexily starred in Eddie's 1959 classic Night of the Ghouls, repeatedly claimed that she had felt the ghostly presence of Ed Wood in her life and that Eddie had appeared to her in her dreams long after his demise. While he was alive, Eddie repeatedly wrote stories and scripts about supposedly "dead" people who enjoy no solace in their own graves. The female narrator of "The Night the Banshee Cried" is summoned back to our world, for instance, to haunt the grounds near her ancestral family home. The protagonist of "Into My Grave," on the other hand, is able to give us a blow-by-blow description of his funeral as it happens. The dancers in Orgy of the Dead, all purportedly deceased, are condemned to thrust and gyrate for all eternity in order to please Criswell, Emperor of the Dark World. The scam artists in the aforementioned Night of the Ghouls are so adept at pretending to contact dead people that they inadvertently manage to attract some of the genuine articles. And, of course, Plan 9 from Outer Space has its trio of shambling human zombies in the thrall of some snooty space aliens. Death, then, is rarely "the end" in an Ed Wood story.
I don't wish to give the impression that there is a geyser or deluge or downpour of Wood news to share. It's more like a slow, steady trickle which never quite ends. If you have a slightly leaky roof and you leave an empty bucket on the floor beneath the source of the seepage, the water will accumulate deliberately, drop by drop. After a while, when the bucket is full or half-full, you can dump it out and start over again. That's basically how I deal with the Ed Wood-related news items which accrue in my e-mail inbox: I let them build up for a while, then dump 'em out all at once.
This record was an unlikely part of my music education.
Kids are inundated with music every day of their lives, of course. We sing to them and encourage them to sing, too, both at home and at school. There are thousands and thousands of recordings made specifically for kids. Children's music is a whole genre unto itself. Meanwhile, TV shows, films, and plays aimed at kids are generally very song-heavy. My musical upbringing, in retrospect, was very typical for American suburban children of my generation. I sang the usual Christmas carols and nursery rhyme-type songs, took piano lessons for a couple of years, learned how to play "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder, and joined the school band when I was about 10 years old.
But my introduction to popular music was a little more unorthodox. It came in the form of a stack of scratchy, well-worn 45 RPM singles that my mother handed down to my sister and me. They'd been hers as a girl, and she wanted us to have them. My grandparents were restaurateurs in Northern Michigan in the 1950s, and they'd let my mom keep the records from the jukebox once they were done with them. Back in those days, jukebox play was an important gauge of a record's success, sort of like how digital downloads are today. From 1955 to 1957, Billboard even had a separate Most Played in Jukeboxes chart for pop songs. That was when rock 'n' roll music -- beloved by teenagers, detested by adults -- was first taking over the world. My mom grew up during those Back to the Future years. What a coup it was for her to get all those jukebox platters for free! How proud she must have been to play them for her friends at slumber parties and the like. Lucky for me, she held on to those cherished 45s. By the late 1970s, when she was a working mom with two kids of her own, she was able to give those records a second life. My sister and I played those twenty-plus-year-old tunes over and over on our dependable little Fisher Price record player in the basement. Of course, we managed to break a few (so sorry, "Peter Gunn Theme"; you were enjoyed), but I still have most of them in my possession today.
Dodie Stevens
Among those ancient records was "Pink Shoe Laces," a million-selling 1959 novelty smash by one-hit wonder Dodie Stevens, who recorded the sassy, lighthearted tune when she was only 13. It reached #3 on the national charts, but Dodie would never so much as graze the Top 40 ever again. She's still at it, though, as a singer and vocal coach more than half a century after her brief flurry of Eisenhower-era fame. The record itself is an odd one and must have baffled grownups at the time. Dodie more or less raps the verses, decades before that genre even existed. Lyrically, the song is about how smitten Dodie is with her older-sounding boyfriend (she claims she "love[s] him truly") because of his flashy wardrobe and material wealth. These would not have been typical sentiments in the stodgy romantic music of the era. (Think: "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.") Only on a rock 'n' roll record could Dodie say such things. A typical lyric: "He takes me deep sea fishing in a submarine/We go to drive-in movies in a limousine/He's got a whirly-birdy and a twelve-foot yacht/Ahhh, but that's-a not all he's got!" Listening to the song with modern ears, it's tough not to take that last couplet as a double entendre, but we must remember that this was 1959! Still, though, perhaps in Dodie Stevens we can see a precursor of Ke$ha or at least Rebecca Black.
As silly and utterly trivial as "Pink Shoe Laces" is, every time I hear it, I think of my mother, who would also have been about 13 when the song was new. I do not currently possess any photographs of my late mother. I don't know whether any audio or video recordings of her even exist. Twenty-two years after her cancer-related death, her face and voice are fading a bit from my memory. What I have is that stack of vinyl records she used to own, and I'm damned glad to have them. Mom, this one's for you. Enjoy.
No, this isn't an outtake from Caligula. It's supposedly a picture of an Onion staff party. (Not pictured: me.)
"May you be happy in the life you have chosen."
-Scrooge's ex-girlfriend, Belle*
*She doesn't really mean it when she says it, but I think it's good advice anyway.
My life is, at least partially by design, uneventful to the point of almost total stasis. I can define myself by the (many) things I dislike: people, crowds, noise, disruption, spending money, following directions, traveling, making small talk, listening, trying to be nice, doing favors for people, and social interactions of all kinds. The extent to which I can successfully and temporarily avoid these terrible maladies is the extent to which my life is tolerable. Of course, this comes at a price. Boredom, alienation, loneliness, and stagnation are the occasional side effects of my chosen lifestyle, but they beat the alternatives: despair, frustration, humiliation, resentment, and an overall disgust with the world and every last person in it. In other words, a relatively solitary, quiet, and dull life is the only kind for me. I couldn't imagine any other way of existing.
"Stand By Me" is dominating the obituaries of R&B singer Ben E. King, who left us on Thursday at the age of 76. And why shouldn't it? Not only did King co-write and sing the ballad, but it was a big hit twice -- twenty-five years apart, no less! -- and inspired cover versions by everyone from John Lennon to Muhammad Ali. It's one of those indestructible oldies that has burrowed so deeply into the collective subconscious that we take it for granted.
But Mr. King's career did not begin or end with those three minutes of evocative, violin-drenched music. Along with his solo career, of course, he was a key member of the Drifters during that group's early prime and thus provided lead vocals on even more indelible prom night classics: "Save the Last Dance for Me," "Spanish Harlem," "This Magic Moment," and more.
But none of those are the Ben E. King song I like best. "Stand by Me" and those Drifters hits I mentioned are definitely on the softer, more genteel side of soul music. Nothing wrong with that. But King could definitely throw down when the song called for it.
As a prime example, take a song he recorded as a B-side for Atco Records in 1964, three years after "Stand by Me." It's called "Let the Water Run Down," and I first heard it on a compilation of songs with the so-called "Bo Diddley beat." (It's that rhythm that goes BOMP BOMP BOMP uh BOMP BOMP!)
This record is about as un-"Stand by Me" as you can get. There's not a violin for miles. The song is edgy, insistent, and urgent. King sound genuinely perturbed as he retreats to the bathroom to sob over the woman who's just dumped him. While he's freaking out, there's a line forming of people who just have to use the can. That's a high pressure situation, and the song captures it perfectly. Enjoy.
I heard this theory once that you should treat everyone you meet as if he or she were the Messiah. I don't believe in the Messiah, but it's an interesting idea anyway, even if it's hopelessly impractical. And, hey, I'm wrong about a lot of shit. I might be wrong on the "Messiah" thing, too. Maybe another one's just around the corner, waiting to fix everything that's wrong with the world. Think of all the people you encounter on a daily basis. Think, furthermore, of all the people you've ever encountered in your whole life. That fat kid in your third grade glass. The barista who served you coffee yesterday. The homeless guy you pretend not to see on your way to work. Any of these folks could be the Messiah. Imagine if one of them turned out to be the Savior of All Mankind, and you were shitty to them, as if they didn't even matter. Then wouldn't you feel like a dope?
Perfect example: In the train station parking lot today, there was this woman -- Caucasian, late middle-age, dark hair, sort of dressed up, if you're trying to picture her -- who walked in front of my car as I was leaving. Not directly in front, I should point out, but close enough that we could see each other's faces. I slowed down, of course, but the woman must have thought I was still going to run her over because she kept waving at me with a distressed look as if I didn't see her. A guy I'm presuming was her husband was with her, and I'm sure she complained about me to him immediately afterward. ("Harry, did you see that? That guy was a maniac! He almost killed me! Good thing I waved!") In truth, I was burned out at the end of another unsatisfying work week and just wanted this lady to get the fuck out of my way so I could get out of that goddamned parking lot and go home. She got to wherever she was going, and I left, cursing her under my breath because she delayed me getting back to my shitty apartment by five seconds. What if this woman were the Messiah? Maybe she is.
But, then again, maybe I'm the Messiah and just don't know it. Wouldn't that be wild? The real Joe Christ. (Much respect to the late filmmaker who went by that name.) I don't have any magic powers, though, and I haven't as yet been inclined toward any world-saving activities. If I'm the new Jesus, I'm a crappy one. Sorry about that.
