Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 71: Some recent acquisitions to the collection

Thanks to Amazon and Ebay, I do have some Ed Wood-related purchases.

A Jail Bait souvenir.

After all these years, I really don't have that much of an Ed Wood collection, at least not compared to some fans I know. And the reasons for that are pretty simple: I don't have the money to buy memorabilia or any place to put it if I had it. So for the most part, I've settled for some DVDs and books—nothing rare—and little else. Sure, I did buy an I Changed My Sex poster and some Mexican lobby cards for Plan 9 at auction a few years ago, but that was very much an anomaly and something I probably wouldn't do again.

Still in all, there are a variety of Ed Wood-related items that can be snagged pretty cheaply on Amazon and Ebay. Not long ago, for instance, I snapped up a matchbook from The Hunter's Inn, a long-gone bar and restaurant in Temple City, CA where Ed filmed a pivotal scene from his crime melodrama Jail Bait (1954). It's a neat little keepsake, complete with one of those old-timey phone numbers: "ATlantic 6-3441." The matchbook promises that The Hunter's Inn is a place "where good food is a reality" and all dishes (including "choice steaks" and "ocean fresh sea foods") are "tailored to your taste." I don't know about that, but I know the place catered to hoodlums like Vic Brady.

Speaking of Vic Brady, that was just one of many roles brought vividly to life by Timothy Farrell, a busy working actor who also contributed his talents to The Violent Years (1956) and Glen or Glenda (1953). Tim was definitely one of the mainstays of Eddie's repertory company, which makes him a fitting candidate for The Ed Wood, Jr. Players, a collection of 36 trading cards from Kitchen Sink Press with artwork by Drew Friedman. I've long been familiar with Drew's surreal yet hyper-real work, sometimes done in collaboration with his brother Josh Alan Friedman, and I've discussed it several times during this series. But I'd never actually owned a physical copy of the trading cards.

Well, I was able to snag a brand-new copy of the second edition, still in the plastic wrap, for about $15 recently. This was a great purchase. The cards are fantastic to look at, with Drew's marvelous artwork on the front and miniature bios of the actors on the back. The usual suspects are here—Bela, Tor, Criswell, Vampira, Ed himself (both in and out of drag)—but Drew includes people like Charlotte Austin, Herbert Rawlinson, Fawn Silver, and Joanna Lee as well. The biographical information is now a little out of date for some of the performers, but that helps make these cards an artifact of the era (mid-1990s) in which they were produced. In a sense, The Ed Wood, Jr. Players is sort of a biography of Ed Wood, just formatted in a highly unusual way on individual 2.5" x 3.5" cards.

Some of Drew Friedman's incredible cards.

Mostly, though, what I've been purchasing lately have been books related to Ed Wood. Not by him, unfortunately, but tangential to him. Call them "Wood-adjacent" books. I knew for instance, that Eddie's friend and frequent coworker Criswell had penned several volumes of his grandiose predictions, and I reviewed two of them, Criswell Predicts from Now to the Year 2000 (1968) and Your Next Ten Years (1969), in this column already. But I hadn't acquired a copy of his third and final prophetic volume, Criswell's Forbidden Predictions (1972), until very recently.

Let me tell you, this one is a doozy. It's not formatted like Cris' other two books at all. The book claims to be "based on Nostradamus and the tarot" and includes Criswell's loopy account of his face-to-face meeting with Nostradamus himself. There are pages and pages depicting tarot cards and various charts showing how to lay them out. So far, I can't make heads or tails of it, but I'm going to try. Incidentally, Cris dedicates his book to someone named Brad Jayson, apparently a buddy of his, who was also to have appeared in The Dead Never Die (1957), a never-to-be movie written by and starring Criswell and directed by Ed Wood.

Another recent addition to my Ed Wood collection is Richard Bojarski's The Films of Bela Lugosi (1980), a very straightforward movie-by-movie guide to the Hungarian actor's work. I first learned about this book in 2014 when I attended Rudolph Grey's presentation at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. Bojarski was one of the last people to interview Eddie, chatting with him in 1977 about Bela Lugosi's career. The author made audio tapes of these interviews, too, several of which wound up in The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1995). Bojarski (1935-2009) was a writer-cartoonist whose work appeared in such magazines as Castle of Frankenstein and The Monster Times. He also wrote a volume called The Films of Boris Karloff in 1974. Grey interviewed Bojarski for Nightmare of Ecstasy, and he shared this strange memory of meeting Eddie:

Author Richard Bojarski.

I entered the apartment and introduced myself, and he was very friendly. It was hot and stifling in that apartment and he was lying flat on his back. He offered me a drink, and we both started drinking. I was asking him about Bela, which was the reason I went out there, and he gave me a few standard answers to a few standard questions. Eventually, a stranger came in and exchanged some friendly insults with Ed Wood, threw down a few dollars on the coffee table. After he left, Ed resumed drinking and brought out a 16mm print of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I think he was going to offer it to me for sale, but I didn't push the conversation in that direction. His wife opened a can of spaghetti and warmed it up on the stove. He did say, "It's tough for a guy to make a living in L.A., I should have gone to Oregon. Or Colorado." He said he could make a better living out there, I didn't know what he was talking about. 

I kept on drinking, and I was getting really drunk. I soon found myself very sick, crawling on my hands and knees to the bathroom, that's how sick I was. I heard his wife say, "Dick, why did you drink all that booze, you didn't leave any for me and Ed."

Good times, huh? Ain't we lucky we got 'em.

My final recent purchase is a book I never would have acquired or even known about if it hadn't been for a picture posted to an Ed Wood forum by superfan Bob Blackburn. Bob befriended Ed's widow Kathy near the end of her life and became co-heir to the Wood estate. She shared with him a number of personal family photos, including this incredible snapshot of actor Kenne Duncan's wake in 1972.

A photo of Kenne Duncan's wake. From the collection of Bob Blackburn.

Among the guests that day were actors David Ward, Paul Marco, and Nona Carver, plus Criswell and Hope Lugosi, Bela's fifth wife. In front, naturally, are Kathy and Ed Wood. Eddie appears to be feeling no pain and is cradling a book in his lap. Upon closer inspection, this is The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars (1969) by Ernest N. Corneau. Little information is available about Mr. Corneau, but his book is a hefty, 300-page reference work about the actors who appeared in Western movies. At the time, such a book was a rarity in the literary world, with most film books concentrating on major figures like Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks and overlooking the big screen cowboys.

Idolizing Buck Jones, whose films he watched religiously back in Poughkeepsie, Ed Wood was famously obsessed with Westerns as a child and continued that obsession into his adult years, with projects like Crossroads of Laredo (1948), Crossroad Avenger (1953), Son of the Renegade (1953) and The Lawless Rider (1954). Eddie's aforementioned repertory company included such Western stars as Kenne Duncan, Tom Tyler, Bud Osborne, Tom Keene, and Johnny Carpenter.

For someone like Ed Wood, a book like The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars, would have been a goldmine of information. It was an odd choice to bring to Kenne Duncan's wake, though. Despite his prolific career, Kenne is only given a brief mention in a chapter called "The Villains We Loved to Hate," where his name is only one of dozens listed. Tyler, Osborne, and Keene are all given complete profiles, however, as is Yakima Canutt, who directed The Lawless Rider. Moreover, the entire book is dedicated to Buck Jones, whose picture takes up a full page. And Osborne, who played the doomed security guard in Jail Bait, is given prominent thanks in the acknowledgements.

Poor Johnny Carpenter doesn't fare so well, though. Here's what Corneau has to say: "He produced, directed and starred in his own horse-operas in the 1950's, but never reached any important status." Ouch.