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| Not everything makes it onto this blog... until today, that is. |
Jack Haley would scoff when people told him that being in The Wizard of Oz (1939) must've been "fun." He knew better. Wearing a stiff, stifling Tin Man costume under those hot MGM studio lights for hours at a stretch? That was no fun. That was work. "I couldn't even sit in it," he told writer Aljean Harmetz. "I could only lean against a reclining board." Haley did have moments of levity on the Oz set, especially while working with his longtime pal Bert Lahr, but making the beloved children's fantasy film was mostly a grueling experience for the actor.
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| Jack Haley, not having fun. |
I've sometimes felt like Jack Haley while working on this Ed Wood series over the course of the last nine years. At least Mr. Haley was paid for his labors. This has been entirely a labor of love for me. I've put in many hours of work, much of it tedious, and literally given away the results for free. I'm not even sure what has compelled me to keep going with this series—a desire to create something, I guess. But didn't I make some royalties off that Steve Apostolof book a couple of years ago? Yeah, just about enough to buy some laundry tokens. There's simply no money in this particular corner of film scholarship.
Sometimes, I have been less than gracious when fielding complaints or corrections from readers. I'm not proud of that, but I can't help it. There's one guy in particular—a self-styled "Hollywood historian" who frequents an Ed Wood group on Facebook—who always seems to have something negative to say about my work and who has been skeptical of every theory I have ever posited about Ed Wood. I suppose I should be grateful that he bothers to read my stuff at all and form an opinion about it, but mostly I just want him to come down with a mild case of bubonic plague. I thought adding a "big fat disclaimer" to the Ed Wood Wednesdays index page would silence the complainers, including my "historian" nemesis. It didn't. My message to them all remains the same: if you think you can do better, you probably can and should.
Greg Dziawer started contributing material to this series in 2015, and I'm very grateful for the amazing stuff he consistently manages to find, but that doesn't mean I work any less work on this blog. The formatting and copy-editing? That's still all me. Sometimes, Greg will send me a whole passel of pictures (many of which I have to censor) with only a skeletal outline of the text he wants to accompany them. It's up to me to put all that material into some kind of readable, coherent article.
Occasionally, Greg will tell me he's working on a particular article, so I'll start making a header image for it in advance. Here's an unused one for a piece he was writing about Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West, aka "The Hubba Hubba Girl," a legendary burlesque dancer who can be seen in the so-called "director's cut" of Jail Bait (1954). The article never materialized, but I didn't want the header to go to waste.
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| Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West. |
More controversially, Greg wanted to look into the career of Cotton Watts, the blackface performer whose extremely offensive and demeaning act can be seen in Jail Bait. Coincidentally, in that director's cut I mentioned earlier, the Evelyn West footage replaces the Cotton Watts footage. Here's the header I devised. It's meant to shock and provoke. That orange "Cotton Watts" logo is supposed to be reminiscent of Looney Tunes, by the way.
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| The notorious Cotton Watts. |
Yet another unrealized Dziawer article was about Kent and the Candidates, the late 1960s/early 1970s rock group that contributed the theme song to Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970). I must have been really enthusiastic for this one, because I created multiple header images featuring the group's leader, Kent Sprague aka Kent Dubarri aka Butch Dubarri. Here's the one I probably would have used.
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| Kent Sprague of Kent and the Candidates. |
And here's an alternate version, in case I wanted something more stylized/cartoony. Looks like I never got around to adding text to this one. Or maybe I was waiting for Greg to write the article, so I could put the title in that big blue space.
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| More of Kent Sprague. |
Not all of my unused header images are for unfinished or unwritten articles. Sometimes, I'll just have a change of heart in the middle of the process and go in a different direction. Below, for instance, is some scrapped artwork for an episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. You can see the image I actually used right here.
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| Greg Dziawer lurking in the shadows. |
And, just for fun, here's some unused artwork I made for an article in Greg's "Magazine Orbit" series. I'm not sure why I created it in the first place or why I never used it. All I know is that I found it on my computer while doing research for this article and decided to present it to you. As with the Kent Sprague picture, I probably would have put some text in that big blue expanse.
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| Two gentlemen featured in Boy Friends magazine. Where are they now? |
So that's it. Essentially, with this article, I wanted to clean house a little and give you some insight into how this blog is made. I realize this might all be self-indulgent, but what are the holidays for if we can't indulge ourselves a little from time to time? You're still free to send corrections and complaints to me, but maybe think about Jack Haley and his reclining board before you do.