Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast #10 by Greg Dziawer and Joe Blevins

This week, we take a look at one of Ed Wood's novels.

Logo for Rocket Pictures.

One of the more intriguing items on Ed Wood's resume is the two-year period he spent in the early '60s working for Autonetics, a division of North American Aviation. NAA was one of the major defense contractors in the US at the time, specializing in inertial guidance systems for submarines and ballistic missiles. A small company called Rocket Studios loaned Eddie out to Autonetics, where he seemed to have worked on both short films as well as in what they called "closed television"—a novel and pioneering use of closed circuit TV to broadcast live training right into the plant for its employees to view.

This also begs the question: what is Rocket Studios? The closest I can come that fits the bill is Rocket Pictures, a California company that did not typically make government-sponsored defense films, rather specializing in sales training literature and filmstrips through its Better Selling Bureau. They had their headquarters at 6108 Santa Monica Blvd, in Hollywood, just a couple of miles east of Hal Guthu's studio.

All of which is mere backdrop setting the stage for Ed's 1967 paperback novel Security Risk. In it, a movie studio making government-sponsored defense films is being attacked by a shadowy group of political baddies ("Lice! Maggots! Germs!") who want to shut them down at all cost. Ex-Korean War vet Colonel Harvey Tate, now a successful New York filmmaker, is called in to investigate.

Join us as we break it all down in this week's Ed Wood Summit Podcast:

BONUS MATERIAL: Here's a detail from a 1959 ad for the Better Selling Bureau, along with the section of Ed Wood's resume dealing with his stint at Autonetics.

(left) An ad for the Better Selling Bureau; (right) Ed Wood's resume.

If you still need more, here are Joe's complete notes on Security Guard, including a breakdown of all the characters, memorable quotes, and Woodian motifs in the book. I've also included the novel's front and back covers, as well as the cover of a latter-day reprint (under the title Two Dicks for Danger) from Woodpile Press.

And if you'd like to see a particular novel reviewed on a future edition of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast, let us know in the comments section of the video.

All episodes of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast can be found here!