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| Five points if you know which TV show I'm referencing. (HINT: It ain't Tales from the Crypt.) |
Remember trick-or-treating when you were a kid? You'd try to keep track of what candy you were collecting along the way, but you'd never get an accurate inventory until you got home and dumped out that pillow case or plastic pumpkin head and sorted through your treasure. There'd always be some weird candy in there that you'd never heard of, stuff you'd never see any other time of the year. Mexican Hats? Bottle Caps? Mary Janes? Tootsie Rolls in flavors other than chocolate? All this stuff seemed exotic to me back then.
Well, I had a similar feeling this week when faithful reader Rob Huffman, host of Sin & Sci-Fi in the '60s, sent me some vintage Ed Wood-related newspaper clippings. These are the Mary Janes and Mexican Hats of Woodology, the obscure stuff that you wouldn't even think to look for because you never knew it existed in the first place. How Rob keeps finding this material I don't know. Let's sort through it together, huh?
The first item comes to us from The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, March 12, 1952, and concerns actor Kenne Duncan of Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1960) fame. While touring Japan in 1951, Kenne lost a .22 pistol that was later recovered in an irrigation ditch.
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| (left) An article about Kenne Duncan; (right) A Japanese poster for Kenne Duncan. |
When he sent this to me, Rob joked that Kenne probably shot someone and ditched the murder weapon, but the cops covered it up because he was a celebrity. ("I'm kidding," he clarified.) Ed Wood fans will be familiar with Kenne Duncan's Japanese tours, which were documented in the short film Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960) and Ed's posthumously-published book Hollywood Rat Race (1998). You can read my thoughts on both of those things right here. I guess the snarling Western actor, memorably nicknamed "Horsecock," had a major following in Japan. That puts him in the same category as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cheap Trick, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
Rob also sent me some tantalizing excerpts from Criswell's long-running syndicated newspaper column. Here's an item from 1972 about Ed Wood's long-gestating I Woke Up Early the Day I Died project, which was not actually produced until 1997. This was published in The Bridgeport Post on March 26, 1972.
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| Criswell (right) talks about The Day I Died. |
Cris and Ed Wood were close friends as well as professional collaborators, so the celebrated seer would have known all about this unproduced screenplay that Ed had been working on (under various titles) since the 1950s. As of 1972, the script was simply called The Day I Died. The morbid plot description that Cris gives us makes the film sound a lot like Eddie's short story "Into My Grave," which was published in 1971. Notice that this column makes no mention of the main character's murderous crime spree. The other truly noteworthy detail is the mention of "Wes Kale, a dramatic new discovery." I cannot find any documentation of Mr. Kale, who sounds like a SpongeBob character. When the script was finally made, Billy Zane played the lead.
The next item on the agenda comes from Criswell's column of December 21, 1975. It, too, was published in The Bridgeport Post and concerns an aborted Ed Wood project called Erotica 76 that was totally unknown to me. Cris says Eddie was planning to direct it.
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| Was Ed Wood (right) hoping to direct Erotica 76? |
Each new detail of this article is more baffling than the one that preceded it. Erotica 76? Jeopardy? Dennis Owens? What are you talking about, Criswell? You reference all of these things as if we know exactly what they are.
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) makes no mention of Erotica 76 or Dennis Owens. I cannot even find a director, producer, screenwriter, or actor of any note called Dennis Owens. (The closest is an East Coast news anchor with that name.) Orgy of the Dead (1965) is a title we're all familiar with, but what is Jeopardy? Could Criswell be referencing the 1953 crime drama, directed by John Sturges? I doubt he's talking about the extremely long-lived game show of that name. That wouldn't make sense in this context.
Furthermore, how will a film that sounds like blatant, low-budget pornography "revive the old days of Hollywood" or "set the new trend of entertainment for the entire family"? I guess all of these questions (and more) will forever remain unanswered. But before we leave this news clipping, let's take a moment to appreciate Criswell's philosophizing about "the waves of time." Eddie makes this kind of dreamy, vague observation a lot in his writing; he and Cris truly thought alike.
The third and final Criswell article for today comes from the April 23, 1958 edition of The Escondido Times-Advocate and concerns the merchandising of the actors in Ed Wood's repertory company.
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| A Criswell column from 1958. Inset: An early 1980s ad for Don Post studios. |
As mentioned earlier, Criswell and Ed Wood were good friends, and I think the former mentioned the latter in his column occasionally just to get Eddie's name in print. In those pre-internet days, a struggling writer-director in Hollywood needed as much media attention as he could possibly get. I don't know if Criswell's columns opened any doors for Eddie, but they couldn't have hurt. Ink is ink.
Here, the great prognosticator declares that Eddie will not only revive classic Hollywood horror movies but will utilize "the best combined movie and TV technics plus a new type of horror makeup." Perhaps Cris was already describing Night of the Ghouls, in which Tor Johnson's badly-scarred Lobo wears the most elaborate makeup ever seen in a Wood-directed movie. In the 1960s, Tor's familiar face became the basis for a popular Halloween mask from Don Post Studios. That company no longer exists, but several versions of the Tor mask are still on the market today.
What's interesting is that Criswell predicted a whole line of masks based on the cast of Night of the Ghouls, but he doesn't include the three most obvious candidates for this treatment: himself, Tor Johnson, and Kenne Duncan. Instead, he suggests masks based on James "Duke" Moore, Paul Marco, Harvey B. Dunn, Mona McKinnon (who appears in Ghouls via repurposed footage), Valda Hansen, and even the obscure Jean Stevens (identified here as "Jennie"). Again, I think this was Cris' sneaky way of getting his costars' names in print.
Rob Huffman sent me further Ed Wood clippings, but I think we will save those for a future installment of this series. After all, you don't eat all your Halloween candy on one night, do you?