 |
| Ed Wood salutes the ladies of his adopted state. (Illustration from Nude But Nice) |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "The Girls of the Golden State." Originally published in Nude But Nice (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 1, no. 2, May/June 1971.
Excerpt: "Clothing certainly does make the woman. There is nothing worse than watching some girls wearing absolute garbage and think it's cute. This rarely happens with the girls from a downtown business building. It is supposed that their bosses see to that . . . at least during the working days of the week. Who can say what they will look like on those off hours and weekends?"
Reflections: No one has ever written quite like Ed Wood. Eddie just had a way of stringing words and phrases together that was exclusively his own. Take his 1971 article "The Girls of the Golden State" as an example. The premise of this piece is simply that California sure has a lot of pretty girls, most of whom came to the state for the motion picture and television industries but wound up as secretaries, topless waitresses, nude models, and porn stars instead. Conceptually, this is nothing special or profound. Eddie has advanced similar ideas in other articles from When the Topic is Sex.
What makes this particular article worthwhile is Eddie's peculiar grasp of the English language. There's something almost alien about his writing style. I keep flashing back to a quote from actress Valda Hansen in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992).
 |
| Valda Hansen on Ed Wood: "He doesn't belong here." |
That quote must've struck Rudolph Grey as significant, too, because he ends the entire oral history section of the book with it. It seems that even Kathy Wood herself thought of her husband as a quasi-alien.
Take this random sentence from "The Girls of the Golden State": "Then, too, the hostesses and other personnel needed to keep a megalopolis running on a prettier keel are crying out for the more pleasant appearing of the applicants." It's difficult to imagine a native speaker of English phrasing a sentence that way. I mean, "keep a megalopolis running on a prettier keel"? Who talks like that? Ed Wood, that's who. I'm also reminded of what Roger Ebert said of Ed Wood's idol, Bela Lugosi, in a review of Dracula (1931):
Lugosi had been living and working in the United States for a decade by the time the film was made, and yet there is something about his line readings that suggests a man who comes sideways to English--perhaps because in his lonely Transylvanian castle, Dracula has had centuries to study it but few opportunities to practice it.
Obviously, Eddie grew up with the language and had plenty of opportunities to practice it, but he still writes like someone who "comes sideways to English." In Ted Newsom's documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994), narrator Gary Owens explains it this way:
Calling an Ed Wood script illogical is like saying dreams make no sense. Images and words went straight from his mind to the page. His stream-of-consciousness dialogue was like a ransom note pasted together from words randomly cut out a Korean electronics manual.
Note that comparison of Ed's writing to Korean. It strikes me now that we commonly use the same word, "alien," to refer to those from different countries and from different planets. Maybe that's why Ed and Bela had such a connection: they both felt like outsiders.
Occasionally in When the Topic is Sex, I've come across articles in which Ed Wood keeps his weirdness in check and writes in a straightforward, almost anonymous style. "The Girls of the Golden State" is not one of those articles. Here's how Eddie describes the plight of women who become adult film actresses:
This might seem the answer to the aspiring young lady who hasn't previously given up on ever getting before the cameras. However, it is only the whipped cream layered over another solid brick. The career in these films is short-lived for any girl, since the producers want new faces for each production . . . new faces and new exquisite bodies. The girls must continually look for new production companies, and eventually they run out and the girl is back behind the desk or coffee urn.
"The whipped cream layered over another solid brick." Phrases like that are why I read Ed Wood articles.
Next: "Freemont Street Flame" (1971)