Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Written Wood by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg gives us an overview of Ed Wood's prolific writing career.

Ed Wood, filmmaker. This is how he is commonly remembered today. If you are a casual fan of Eddie, you likely found him through his low-budget 1950s movies, which earned him the title of "The World's Worst Director." While that is an argument for another day, there is unquestionably a far more prolific avenue of Ed's work and creativity to travel: texts. Many of them, of many kinds. We've shared many in this series. This week, let's delve into a high-level summary of those iterations, both known and speculative.  (Click the hyperlinks below for examples and to dig deeper.)

1. Theatrical Plays 

While the play itself appears to be lost, Casual Company, a comedy cowritten by Ed's fellow service member Harry Kone, is one of his first documented texts. And it surely was staged. An August 1946 Poughkeepsie Journal article notes that it had by then been staged 48 times for military and civilian audiences. It even played at Poughkeepsie High School, Ed Wood's alma mater. That same article notes that Ed wrote other plays, all comedies in "working draft" form, and that one was titled The Inconsiderate Corpse. These plays appear, sadly, to all be lost.

2. Novelizations of Plays

Penned by Ed solo, the novelized version of Casual Company survived, and was subsequently re-printed in serialized fashion in Cult Movies magazine in the '90s. In the August 1946 article mentioned above, it's also noted that a (now lost) novelized version of The Inconsiderate Corpse was completed but in "working form" and would be going through rewrites. It's worth pointing out that the same article lists Ed's ambition as a theatrical writer and actor. After he arrived in Hollywood in 1948, his interest would, of course, shift to film.

3. Film Scripts

Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster. Those are just a few of the many film scripts Eddie wrote. In fact, he would write all of the feature films he directed, in addition to penning scripts directed and produced by others, including the majority of films made by Stephen Apostolof.

4. Script Polishing 

Jack Descent, who purchased five scripts from Ed and ultimately produced films from two of them, mentioned to me that Ed was known for quickly polishing scripts written by others. The extent of this work and specific titles are unknown.

5. Movie Trailer Voiceover/Narrations

Ed himself narrates a number of trailers, including for many of the aforementioned Apostolof films. While we can't say it with certainty, it's reasonable to suppose he wrote the voiceover copy as well. Known examples, literally and figuratively, evoke his distinctive "voice."

6. Film Reviews/Overviews

Would a filmmaker write an uncredited review of his own film? While again we can't say with certainty what Ed may or may not have written, there were a number of sex film mags that covered the work Ed was involved in during the late '60s and early '70s. This one, covering Necromania, is equal parts review and feature overview.

7. Teleplays

In addition to feature film scripts, Ed also wrote for television, this iteration of text largely explored in the early '50s. He sometimes wrote for others and sometimes directed his own script, as here.

8. Paperback Fiction Novels

Among Ed's texts and outside of his film scripts, his adult paperbacks are undoubtedly the best known work. You don't have to be a Wood obsessive to be familiar with, or to have even read, such paperbacks as Killer in Drag or Death of a Transvestite. Those are just a few of the many dozens of paperbacks we know of, and there are likely many more that are lost or unidentified. The number could, in fact, well exceed a hundred titles. Just last year, one more turned up, and I will be sharing a few new finds soon! Be careful, though, as the rumor mill oft-times misattributes titles to Ed's hand.

9. Sociosexal Paperbacks

Different than his fiction paperbacks, the sociosex titles generally focus upon a sexual topic or cluster of sexual topics, told from a pseudo-academic point of view. Several of these titles include a byline for Dr. T.K. Peters, sometimes mistaken to be yet another pseudonym's of Ed's. It's not, but only lends murkiness to attributions in this vein. Often, the texts is accompanied by graphic sexual photos on the facing page. Those photos are often strangely captioned, arguably by Ed himself, yet one more textual iteration of his work.

10. Book Reviews

Similar to film reviews, we have to ask the question: would an author, uncredited, review his own work? While we once again cannot say for certain due to the lack of credit, it's hard to imagine that anyone else would have taken the time to review them. Last year's incredible compendium of Ed articles When the Topic is Sex includes a few examples. (And those titles are yet another paperback iteration, the "Pendulum Pictorial.")

11. Short Stories

We've seen two great compilations of Ed's adult magazine short story work in recent years, Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever. Ed was sometimes credited under his own name, while at other times the stories were credited to a pseudonym or given no credit at all. A mid-'70s resume, typed by Ed himself, exhaustively lists hundreds of titles, but as we have seen, there are others. Perhaps many others. Earlier in his career, Ed was represented by Forry Ackerman as his literary agent, and he may have additionally produced work in the sci-fi/horror realm that is now lost.

12. Magazine Articles

As with the short stories, Ed penned a staggering amount of articles for adult magazines in the last decade of his life, perhaps starting as soon as 1962 or 1963. As Joe Blevins noted here last week in his wrap-up to his comprehensive review of every article contained in When the Topic is Sex, there are many iterations of what constitutes an article, from faked interviews to research-based pieces.

13. Magazine Editorials

Though uncredited, the editorials for many of the sex magazines Ed wrote often strongly suggest his authorship. Have a look at a few and decide for yourself!

14. Pictorial Texts ("Short Picture Subjects") 

The typed resume earlier mentioned contains pages and pages of titles listed as "short picture subjects." My first inclination years back was that they might be titles of loops that Ed had subtitled. Then one day, leafing through a magazine, I recognized a title from the resume as the title to a text-accompanied photo feature. That resume lists a staggering 716 items of this type in a mere three years. While these are uncredited, they are most often written by Ed, as can be verified by that resume. 

One thing about the pages of that resume had puzzled me, a notation on the upper right of each page of the "short picture subjects" section: "1500 min." Thanks to James Pontolillo for letting me know that this likely was shorthand for "1500 words minimum," which means those photo features with shorter texts or just captions could very well have been written by Eddie, too! The "short picture subjects," like other textual iterations written by Ed, tend to have their own distinctive and highly consistent internals, e.g. extolling the wonders of free sex and imagining the mind states of the models in the photos. In select instances, they can be quite extensive, as here.

15. Loop Subtitles and Box Cover Summaries

It was first noted in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy that Ed wrote subtitles for silent 8mm pornographic shorts (aka loops). Again, internal consistencies suggest that the same author may have penned the subtitles for literally hundreds of loops. While generally sparse, the subs most often warm up the sexual action when not punctuating the likely sounds (Mmmm's and Ahhhh's.) We've delved into the subtitles often, here, here and elsewhere throughout this series. The box cover summaries for the loops, too, often suggest Ed's voice.
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16. Miscellaneous

Into this category, we'll put photo captions, loop and magazine titles, ancillary magazine texts, magazine ads, and loop series taglines. I could go on an on with possible iterations. How about copy for sales training filmstrips? He surely wrote copy for commercials and industrial and sponsored short films, first for Story-Ad Films in the late '40s and then while on loan-out from Rocket Pictures to Autonetics in the early '60s.

Just how much could Ed Wood possibly have written? We'll keep trying to answer that question as this series continues.