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| An unproduced Ed Wood script from the 1970s has now seen the light of day. |
Francis William "Frank" Leahy. Now, where did I first run across that hallowed name from sports history? Probably in issue #11 of Cult Movies magazine, which reported that Ed Wood wrote an unproduced film about him circa 1975 called The Frank Leahy Legend. After a tiny bit of digging, I soon learned that Ed's script was based on a book by Bernard J. Williams and that the unmade screenplay still existed and was languishing in an archive in Los Angeles somewhere. Not being a football fan myself, I probably never would have heard of Leahy, who died in 1973, otherwise. He just wasn't on my radar.
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| A new book from Bear Manor. |
I could have pursued this case further, but I simply never got around to it. What can I say? Ed Wood wrote a lot of things in his 54 years, and a script about a 1940s Notre Dame football coach somehow didn't seem as exciting as a novel about a cross-dressing hitman or a movie about wife-swapping suburbanites. Life is short, as both Ed Wood and Frank Leahy knew all too well. So I let The Frank Leahy Legend stay on the shelf.
But a couple of dedicated Woodologists, W. Paul Apel and Greg Javer, decided to hunt down the Leahy script, and now their findings have been published in a new book from Bear Manor Media called I Watched Football Early the Day I Died. In addition to the complete screenplay, rescued from the Loyola Marymount University archives, this volume contains a foreword by Bob Blackburn, friend to Ed's widow Kathy, and introductory notes by Greg and Paul. Best of all, Paul provides explanatory notes throughout the entire screenplay; it's like a commentary track for a movie that was never made.
While reading the screenplay, I kept thinking of a quote from the notorious John Andrews in Nightmare of Ecstasy: "Eddie wrote a horror script that would have been fine for 1934 but not 1974." Yeah, even during his booziest, porn-iest, most debauched years, Eddie could get mired in the past sometimes. What's most amazing about The Frank Leahy Legend is that Ed Wood (or anyone) considered it to be marketable to jaded movie audiences who'd already seen The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973). Even nostalgic movies from the 1970s like Paper Moon (1973) and The Summer of '42 (1971) looked at the past through a modern lens.
Meanwhile, apart from a smattering of profanity, The Frank Leahy Legend is the type of creaky, old-fashioned, highly sanitized biopic you might have seen in the 1930s or '40s, the kind that basically acts as a feature-length commercial for its subject. If you watch enough TCM during the off-peak hours, you'll see these flattering films about politicians, songwriters, war heroes, entertainers, inventors, and athletes. Try sitting through something like Swanee River (1939) or The Babe Ruth Story (1948), and you'll know what I mean. This type of cornball biopic was already old hat when Steve Allen starred in The Benny Goodman Story in 1956, and Eddie was trying to get away with an even cornier script two decades later! Actual line spoken (without irony) by an actual character in this movie: "You know Frank Leahy, you're truly an amazingly, great man..."
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| Leahy: Neither hero nor villain. |
But was Leahy amazing? Or great? Or amazingly great? Eh, I don't know. He certainly won a lot of football games in his day, but he did it by bending the rules just a bit. He got married. He had kids. He yelled at his players occasionally. He sold rubber or something on the side. He really liked Notre Dame. Does that count as a personality?
Leahy's life doesn't really fit any of the standard biopic templates, and in this unproduced screenplay, the reader can sense Ed Wood struggling to turn this material into something resembling a movie. I wouldn't call Leahy a hero or a role model, necessarily, and his life is not exactly inspiring. Then again, he's not a villain or a cautionary tale either. We can't learn anything from his story, because Frank doesn't learn anything from his own story. Even that scoundrel Charles Foster Kane has an epiphany in the last few seconds of his life.
Furthermore, Leahy doesn't seem to have had a quirky, outsized personality, the kind that would make him a good movie character. His coach and mentor Knute Rockne did, though, and Ed's screenplay makes Knute a colorful supporting character. Our protagonist, however, remains opaque. Either Frank Leahy is unknowable or there is just nothing to know about him beyond the surface details.
Either way, W. Paul Apel makes a splendid companion on this journey through the screenplay, jumping in whenever he has something to add or explain. (His commentary definitely helped me understand a few murky plot points along the way.) Unlike me, Paul's actually read the book upon which this script is based, so he can better explain how Ed Wood adapted this material. My guess is that Eddie was merely a hired gun on this movie and banged out this script strictly for the paycheck, but he manages to work some of his obsessions into The Frank Leahy Legend anyway. There are numerous funeral scenes, for instance, and even a prominent reference to Eddie's beloved angora.
For the most part, it seems like Eddie went out of his way to avoid showing any football in this supposedly football-centric movie. We know Wood was no sports fan, so when he wrote The Frank Leahy Legend, he tended to skip over all those pesky games and practices. Instead, we get a lot of scenes of Leahy talking to people in various offices. Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) are similarly chatty in nature, as is Wood's later film The Young Marrieds (1972). While the lack of action in this script could have been a budgetary concern, the stiflingly static nature of The Frank Leahy Legend makes it feel like something from Ed Wood's 1950s heyday.
Overall, The Frank Leahy Legend is an intriguing "what if?" from Ed Wood's strange career. It's a relatively wholesome piece of work from a time when Eddie's own life was anything but. Perhaps that's why he wanted to work on this project. It was a chance to do something with no connection whatsoever to pornography or even horror. This biopic may have been stodgy and old-fashioned, but it was respectable. This was one he could write home to Mother about.
You can purchase your own copy of I Watched Football Early the Day I Died directly from Bear Manor or from online retailers like Barnes & Noble or Amazon.