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| Here's how my blog looked ten years ago. |
It was never supposed to be like this. Ed Wood Wednesdays, as I have explained many times over the last decade, was planned as a limited series back in 2013. Emphasis on limited. I'd just gotten the DVD box set, Big Box of Wood (2011), and already had a handful of other Wood films in my collection. I thought it'd be fun to put those films into chronological order and review them one at a time, supplementing my commentary with little historical tidbits from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), which was pretty much the only Ed Wood book on the market then. I'd start with Crossroads of Laredo (1948) and end with Hot Ice (1978). That was it.
The project came along at a time when this blog was in need of a new direction. Dead 2 Rights started in October 2009 as a spinoff of a zombie movie podcast called Mail Order Zombie, where I was a regular. But that show ended in April 2013, and I was getting a little burned out on the zombie-related content anyway. Less than a year earlier, I'd had a complete emotional meltdown and been hospitalized for suicidal depression, and this blog briefly became a journal of my recovery as I started taking meds and going to therapy. But I got bored with writing about that stuff, too.
For a while, I busied myself with reviews of public domain comedies, thinking that those lighthearted, often corny movies from the past might help me shake off my melancholy. They didn't, but I'm still proud of that series. Maybe I shouldn't have abandoned it so abruptly. But the Ed Wood stuff eventually became this blog's main focus and crowded out everything else.
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| Here I am with my mother at Christmas. |
But why Ed Wood rather than, say, a more "respectable" director? Well, like many middle-aged people, I was probably trying to recapture some aspect of my lost youth. I first saw Eddie's films at a Halloween movie marathon in October 1992. I was a high schooler at the time, and this would be one of the last positive experiences of my teenage years. Shortly after that, my mother's cancer returned with a vengeance. Her death sent my life into a tailspin, and the next few years were bleak indeed. For me, Ed Wood somehow became an icon of happier times.
I never put myself forward as any kind of expert on Ed Wood, nor did I intend this series as a deep dive into obscure Wood trivia. In fact, that was the very opposite of my intention for this series. My goal was (and, to some degree, still is) to write for a general audience, and I felt these articles should be comprehensible to the average reader, even one who'd never seen any of Wood's movies. The immediate reaction to Ed Wood Wednesdays was largely positive, with each article getting several thousand hits -- small potatoes by internet standards but very good for a niche blog like this.
Very soon, though, people started to contact me, either by email or through instant messaging. Some were merely curious and wanted to know if I'd be covering certain speculative Wood films or delving into Wood's written work. Some wanted to make corrections or school me on Ed Wood lore. Some wanted to promote Wood-related projects of their own. And some felt I was an interloper, horning in on territory that rightfully belonged to others. Every fandom has its share of gatekeepers, and Woodology is no exception. I have written of a so-called "Hollywood historian" who considers himself a Wood expert and who has been unfailingly hostile towards me for years. I try not to hate anyone, but this guy makes it tough.
There were some upsides to being the author of Ed Wood Wednesdays. Not many, but some. I was interviewed by The New York Times back in 2014. That was kinda neat. My father had no idea how the internet worked, so telling him about my blog was futile, but even he had heard of the Times. A few professional opportunities came my way because of Ed Wood Wednesdays as well. I know that I was asked to contribute to the Girl Gangs, Biker Boys book (2017) because of this series. The book Dad Made Dirty Movies also came about because journalist Jordan Todorov found my lengthy, detailed reviews of the movies Ed Wood made with director Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s.
The salad days of Ed Wood Wednesdays did not last long, though, maybe a year and a half. Then things started to turn sour. For one thing, Google's search algorithm changed and stopped sending people to my blog. It was like a faucet had been turned off. I lost 95% of my audience in a very short amount of time, and it has never recovered. A typical Ed Wood Wednesdays article now gets, at most, a few dozen hits. Only the diehards remained, and they wanted obscure Wood trivia that I was not always able to supply. My life, too, remained chaotic. I abruptly quit my corporate job on a whim in August 2015 and made a quixotic attempt at a career as a freelance writer with virtually no idea how that profession works. What was I thinking? I don't know.
This series probably would have ended in 2015 had it not been for Greg Dziawer, one of my most persistent emailers. He'd inundate me with Wood trivia, some of which I could barely understand. At the time, I was trying to make a go of the freelancing thing and didn't really feel like contributing anything substantial to this blog. (I found that, when I wrote for money, I was less willing to write for fun.) So I made the decision to turn the reins of Ed Wood Wednesdays over to Greg.
I felt a little guilty about that choice. I called myself a writer, after all, but I wasn't even writing my own blog anymore. For the true Wood diehards, though, this was probably when Ed Wood Wednesdays "got good." Greg was much more willing to supply the graduate-school-level trivia that they wanted, and he made no attempt to court a wider audience with his articles. His stuff was for the true believers only. Greenhorns need not apply. He was combing through old magazines and loops and even contacting people connected to Wood in search of material for the blog. (I was never good at that.) More than once, I suggested he start his own blog, but he thought it was better to publish his findings on my blog. So the series continued.
Eventually, as my freelance writing career evaporated, I drifted back to Ed Wood Wednesdays. Between the main series and such supplementary series as Ed Wood Extras and the 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, plus my individual reviews of Ed's short stories and magazine pieces, I have now written something like 380 articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr., totaling god knows how many thousands of words. It's possible that I've written more about Eddie than anyone, certainly enough to fill several books.
What keeps me going? Well, it helps that the last 10 years has been a time of great discovery in the world of Ed Wood. So many of Ed's movies and written works have come to light in the last decade, and more continue to be found. It's truly the best time to be a Wood fan. Plus, as the founder of this blog, I just get stuff sent to me. I especially need to thank Philip R. Fry, Greg Dziawer, and Bob Blackburn for hooking me up with some Wood goodness. That's the ultimate perk of founding this series.
More than that, though, I find some kind of strange solace in the works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. I can't explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. It's not that Ed is a hero to me, exactly. He was a drunk who beat his wife; that's no role model. But in his films and his writing and, yes, his own life, he created this fascinating alternate universe that I like to explore, even after all these years. It's my own Oz or Narnia or Wonderland or Middle Earth, populated with beings as extraordinary as any you'd find in those fictional places. I got into this series to cover Ed's movies, but it's his prose that actually gives me the most satisfaction these days. There's just a certain cadence to Ed's writing I find comforting, and reading is for me a more immersive experience than watching.
Make no mistake, Ed Wood Wednesdays is a ton of work for me. It generates no money whatsoever -- quite the opposite, really -- and takes up an inordinate amount of time. That's something I have less and less of, especially now that I work a full-time office job again with a commute and also do a weekly podcast that requires hours of writing, researching, and editing. But I intend to keep this series going as long as I'm physically and mentally able to do it, long after everyone has stopped reading it. Ultimately, the audience for Ed Wood Wednesdays is and always will be myself. I write these things so that I can read them when they're done.
Occasionally over the last ten years, people have asked me if I'll ever write a book about Ed Wood. I tell them that I have. I've just been publishing it online for free, one chapter at a time. And I hope it'll never be finished.