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| Hellborn is like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. |
One of the strangest passages in Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls (1959) occurs just four and a half minutes into the film. Ostensibly a follow-up to Bride of the Monster (1955), Ghouls is another of Wood's supernatural horror thrillers. The plot revolves around a phony medium, Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan), who inadvertently manages to summon the dead while performing fraudulent seances in a spooky mansion. For some reason, though, narrator Criswell takes a few minutes to talk to us about juvenile delinquency:
Your daily newspapers, radio, and television dares to relate the latest in juvenile delinquency. At times, it seems juvenile delinquency is a major problem of our law enforcement officers. But is this the major horror of our time? Is this violence and terror a small few perpetrate the most horrible, terrifying of all crimes our civil servants must investigate?
The National Safety Council keeps accurate records on highway fatalities. They can even predict how many deaths will come on a drunken holiday weekend. But what records are kept? What information is there? How many of you know the horror, the terror I will now reveal to you?
As we hear this voice-over monologue, accompanied by hot jazz drumming and a wailing siren, Wood shows us flashes of seemingly unrelated footage: a police car whizzing from somewhere to somewhere else; young people dancing and eating at a pizzeria called Jake's Pizza Joint; two men (Ed Wood and Conrad Brooks) fighting in a pit as a crowd watches; a gang of three men beating the tar out of a fourth man as a girl stands off to the side; a car going off the road and tumbling down a cliff before crashing into a tree, etc. Apart from the shots of the police car—this is another of Ed's many police procedurals—none of this footage belongs in Night of the Ghouls. So what's it doing there?
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| Why is this footage in Night of the Ghouls? |
The answer can be found in Rudolph Grey's book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). In 1956, in collaboration with Glen or Glenda (1953) producer George Weiss, Eddie attempted to write and direct a juvenile delinquent thriller known alternately as Hellborn or Rock and Roll Hell. Grey describes the project as Wood's answer to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and states that the director shot 1,200 feet of film in July 1956 before running out of money. This precious footage, which Weiss ultimately sold to actor Conrad Brooks, was recycled in both Night of the Ghouls and The Sinister Urge (1960). Had the film been completed, the cast would've included Brooks in the leading role, alongside Duke Moore, Tom Mason, and Wood himself.
Elsewhere in the book, Brooks gives his version of the events to Grey. He seems to think Hellborn was a rough draft for The Sinister Urge.
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| Conrad Brooks talks about Hellborn. |
Okay, then, let's take a look at The Sinister Urge. Like Ghouls, this is not a film about juvenile delinquency. Instead, it's about two cops (Duke Moore and Kenne Duncan) trying to bust up a local smut ring. Nevertheless, Wood includes some leftover footage of Jake's Pizza Joint, where the kids are still dancing, eating, and enjoying themselves. Clad in a windbreaker, just like James Dean in Rebel, Conrad Brooks walks down an alley and into the pizzeria. There, he pulls a switchblade on Ed Wood, who retaliates by smashing a bottle to use as a makeshift weapon. Eddie and Conrad wander outside and start slapping each other around. This escalates into a full on fistfight in an adjacent pit, the same sequence we saw in Ghouls.
The only thing connecting this footage to the rest of The Sinister Urge is that Eddie has inserted some cutaways of young thug Dirk (Dino Fantini) wandering around Jake's and supposedly eavesdropping on conversations. Since this footage was shot much later, Dirk obviously cannot interact with the other characters. All he can do is skulk on the sidelines. Eventually, the thug wanders over to a phonebooth and calls the cops. This leads to more footage of police cars and more sirens. The juvenile delinquents, including Eddie and Connie, scatter.
Later in The Sinister Urge, scratchy-voiced crime queen Gloria (Jean Fontaine) dispatches four of her girls to visit a man named Claussen, who owes money to her partner Johnny Ryde (Carl Anthony). Gloria is quite surprised to learn that these girls are currently in church and wonders if they're trying to peddle pornographic pictures there. We then see four young women walking from a church to an ice cream parlor. Three of them team up on the pudgy, bald proprietor (Conrad Brooks' brother, Henry Bederski), shoving a vanilla cone right into his face, while a fourth robs the cash register.
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| The Hellborn VHS tape |
The documentary itself, like On the Trial of Ed Wood, is a humble, homemade affair. After a crude title card, it begins with Cult Movies magazine founder Michael Copner giving us an overview of what we're about to see. The tape, Copner says, will include all the existing footage from Hellborn, plus some "test footage" that Ed Wood shot in 1948 after arriving in Hollywood, plus Conrad Brooks' novelty short film Mystery in Shadows (1960). He does not mention a controversial interview with actor Peter Coe that closes the documentary.
Cut to an office where a sweater-clad Conrad Brooks is seated in front of a poster for Bela Lugosi's The Invisible Ghost (1941). Copner asks him questions from offscreen. Brooks talks about his early years, working on Glen or Glenda with Ed Wood and George Weiss. According to the actor, Wood called him a few months after Glenda wrapped with some good news: Weiss was so impressed with Brooks' performance that he wanted to use him in another picture. Brooks says the plan was to do a movie about teenage gangs, directly citing Rebel Without a Cause as an influence.
Brooks then describes traveling to San Fernando, CA to film a fight sequence with Wood in the blazing July heat. "It was a tough shoot," Brooks says, "but we were very fortunate." Weiss was pleased with the resulting footage and traveled to New York to raise additional funds. This proved unsuccessful, so Eddie moved on to making Jail Bait (1954) and Bride of the Monster (1955) while Weiss concentrated on marketing Glen or Glenda. It seemed that Hellborn had gotten lost in the shuffle.
Eventually, George Weiss relocated to New York and sold the Hellborn footage to Wood and Brooks. "Ed Wood and I were partners on this deal," Brooks specifies. The actor insists that Wood was especially fond of the San Fernando fight footage because it looked natural, not stagy. For this reason, Hellborn was Wood's "pet picture," and he talked of reviving it after each project.
After completing Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Wood recruited actress Mona McKinnon and began shooting new footage for Hellborn. Brooks describes going with Wood to various places, including Saugus, where they filmed some car chase footage. Brooks adds with a grin, "Ed naturally doubled up playing these various women roles." Copner asks if these characters were supposed to be "men dressed up as women" or if Ed were merely trying to save some money. Brooks says it was the latter. Speaking of money, the actor says that producer Roy Reid agreed to finance The Sinister Urge based solely on the right to use the Hellborn fight footage. Brooks says that he even acted as a stuntman in the aforementioned scene of the car going over the cliff.
By Conrad Brooks' estimation, Wood shot about 15 to 20 minutes of footage for the project. Along with the famous fight sequence, there were various pickup shots, including Ed Wood holding up a filling station in Newhall, CA and a boozy picnic scene shot at Griffith Park circa 1956. Wood never did get around to filming the studio sequences, and the footage wound up in Brooks' possession. The actor describes Hellborn as an action-heavy movie that would have gotten away from Wood's reliance on dialogue.
At last, 12 minutes into this 55-minute documentary, the Hellborn footage begins. It was all shot silently, so we hear some very anachronistic, quasi-porn music on the soundtrack. (I might've suggested either using 1950s library music or simply the sound of a whirring projector.)
The first footage is the brutal three-against-one mugging from Night of the Ghouls. Three thugs, including Conrad Brooks, attack a well-dressed man in an alley near a fence. A woman (Mona McKinnon) in a sweater and skirt stands nearby, watching without much apparent interest. Ed Wood casually sidles up next to her and starts watching the action himself. The thugs rob the well-dressed man of his wallet, watch, and jewelry. Ed Wood must be their boss, because Brooks gives the wallet to him. Eddie nonchalantly hands him a switchblade in return and walks away with the woman. Brooks crawls on his belly like a snake and advances toward the well-dressed man.
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| (left) Mona McKinnon and Ed Wood; (right) Conrad Brooks slithers like a snake. |
The next scene takes place in a park. Brooks hides behind a tree and spies on a lady (Ed Wood in drag) in an angora sweater and knee-length skirt. Brooks wrestles the unfortunate lass to the ground, and the camera lingers on "her" lifeless body.
After that, we cut to a church. The four young ladies from The Sinister Urge emerge and, as expected, walk to an ice cream parlor. Again, they beat up poor Henry Bederski and rob the cash register. We've seen most of this before. What's interesting to Ed Wood completists, however, is that we glimpse a bit more of this sequence. We get an establishing shot of the church, for instance, plus a shot of a battered Henry Bederski staggering to his feet to call the cops. Wood also shows us the four ladies walking back to the church and then, mere seconds later, leaving again.
The next footage, in very poor shape, is of that gas station holdup in Newhall. A convertible pulls up with two women inside: Mona McKinnon and a cross-dressing Ed Wood with a cheap blonde wig! Mona keeps the engine running while Eddie saunters inside. He comes back with a handful of cash a few seconds later, and they speed off. Rough as it is, this is the footage that most Ed Wood fans will want to see.
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| (left) A battered Henry Bederski; (right) A cross-dressing Ed Wood. |
Cut to a sidewalk somewhere in Los Angeles. This footage is also extremely grainy. Conrad Brooks comes strolling down the boulevard, accompanied by a chubby man (Henry?) with a plaid shirt and a newsboy cap. They spot a nice-looking car, then look in both directions to see if the coast is clear. It is. They get into the vehicle and drive off. I guess the implication is that they're stealing it.
We now arrive at that picnic scene Brooks and Copner discussed earlier. It starts with Conrad Brooks and four ladies (the same ones from the ice cream heist?) sitting at a long wooden picnic table, drinking and laughing. Connie feels up a brunette in a fuzzy angora sweater. Somewhere nearby, a couple is making out in a car. It's hard to tell the actors apart, but I'd estimate there are about three other guys there besides Conrad. The men guzzle beers and paw the ladies. Connie takes his date, the sweater girl, into the woods for some romance.
This concludes the Hellborn footage. In all, it's only about eight minutes in length. Despite all that talk at the beginning of the tape, the fight sequence between Ed and Conrad is not included. Those who wish to see it can screen either Night of the Ghouls or The Sinister Urge. The car chase footage is likewise absent, but it, too, can be seen in Ghouls.
The rest of the 1993 documentary is worth watching, even if it has little to do with Hellborn. The footage from 1948 with Conrad and his brothers is of particular interest because it may constitute Ed Wood's first-ever professional directorial effort: a brief, wobbly Western called Range Revenge for which he was paid $60. Johnny Carpenter even turns up in this short film, as does Ed Wood's first-ever use of stock footage! This little movie deserves its own article someday. Mystery in Shadows is also a memorable, gimmicky little short that's fun to watch. Then, there is the interview with a gravely ill, bedridden Peter Coe. This segment of the video raises troubling ethical questions and may even border on elder abuse.
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| (left) Conrad Brooks and Barbara Parsons; (right) An early Ed Wood stock shot. |
This week, though, I am focusing strictly on Hellborn. Namely, what can we glean about this unfinished project from the few scraps of film that still exist, scattered across two features and a rough-hewn documentary? I've never seen any reference to there being a script, and I'm not convinced there ever was one. Ed Wood's plan seems to have been to film some random action scenes and then somehow tie them together into a narrative. In a way, that's what ended up happening. The Hellborn footage is awkwardly retrofitted into both Night of the Ghouls and The Sinister Urge with only minimal attempts at justifying its inclusion.
Had the movie been made, though, what would it have been about? Clearly, the focus is on young people terrorizing the citizens of Los Angeles through a string of crimes -- muggings, robberies, car thefts, even murders. There are both male and female crooks this time, even if some of the "women" are played by Ed Wood. Eddie's main role in Hellborn seems to be that of a low-level crime boss, a figure not unlike Fagin in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). This man has an army of hooligans he dispatches to do his dirty work. One of his "employees" is our troubled protagonist, played by Conrad Brooks. A moody, violent type, Conrad eventually turns on his boss, and the two have an epic fight in full view of the public. Tonally, Hellborn would likely have been close to The Violent Years (1956).
I'm not sure what significance rock music would have had in this story. Eddie's distaste for the genre is documented in Nightmare of Ecstasy. Artist-writer Don Fellman, a friend of Wood's, found it ironic that Eddie would sign a contract with the rock label Blue Dolphin, since he held rock music in such low regard. I'd imagine that, in Hellborn (or Rock and Roll Hell), the genre would be presented as a gateway to juvenile delinquency and crime, much the way marijuana is in Louis Gasnier's Reefer Madness (1936). I have to wonder about Conrad Brooks' repeated assertion that this project started filming in 1952, since rock and roll didn't catch on until 1954 and Rebel Without a Cause wasn't released until 1955. But Connie was there, and I wasn't.
Reflecting on the project many decades after its inception, Conrad Brooks seemed to regard it as the one that got away. As he told Michael Copner:
I just saw it recently. For 30 years, I haven't seen it. When you and I went down to the studio at the screening room and when I looked at it, I couldn't believe it. Is this what we did 30 years ago, Ed Wood and I? I look back and I say, geez, I kinda regret that we never really got to finish that movie.
Hellborn will forever be one of those missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is Ed Wood's career. Had it been finished, would it now be considered a cult classic? I'm skeptical. Even the most famous of Eddie's crime thrillers (Jail Bait, The Violent Years, The Sinister Urge) have taken a backseat to his sci-fi and horror films. This would have been just one more to add to the pile. But for Eddie's dedicated fans, it can be fascinating to pore over these grainy images and imagine what might have been.