Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast #28 by Greg Dziawer

Two ladies enjoy each other's company in Caine Richmond's "Les Pad."

Dick Trent and Ann Gora are names known to any true Ed Wood superfan, since Eddie wrote books, articles, and scripts under these monikers for years, but have we discovered yet another of his many professional pseudonyms?

The sheer volume of texts written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the 1960s and '70s is unquestionably, well, voluminous. At some point in the early 1960s, Ed began writing for the adult entertainment industry—paperbacks and screenplays at first, followed by magazine articles and 8mm porno loops. By the end of the decade, he was writing all of these and then some, often concurrently!

In the midst of this writing frenzy, an obscure adult publishing company called Bernel and Associates—likely a predecessor to the Pendulum/Calga powerhouse that employed Eddie for years—briefly published a small number of adult mags. No one knows for sure how many, but one was Tailgate from 1968, which seemingly ran for just one issue. In that lone edition, there are three texts. One of them, an article called "Sappho" credited to Caine Richmond, appeared here last year. I suggested, gently, that it might be the work of Edward D.Wood, Jr.

But "Sappho" was not the only text in that issue credited to the mysterious Caine Richmond. The other was an intriguing short story called "Les Pad." This week on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast, Joe Blevins joined me to break it down, and we implicitly asked the question: could it, too, have been written by Ed Wood?

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

Further reading:

• A review of Ed Wood's novel Nighttime Lez (1968)

• A review of Ed's article "Sappho Revisited" (1973)

Kane Richmond

P.S. Reader Bill Shute has some additional insight into the "Caine Richmond" pseudonym:

Using the name of one of the greats of serials and b-movies, Kane Richmond, spelled creatively, is certainly something Ed Wood would have done.... proudly. This is a man who was excited to get old genre-film pros such as Reed Howes (who he wrote about admiringly in Hollywood Rat Race) and Herbert Rawlinson in his films. Had Kane Richmond still been working in films in the 1950s (he retired from the screen and went into the business world circa 1948-49), there's no question that EW would have tried to get him for a film and would have loved chatting with him about his serials and low-budget action films. It always puts a smile on my face when Ed Wood champions an old-time Hollywood figure, someone who was largely forgotten by the industry.

Thanks for the added info, Bill!