Ed Wood Wednesdays: Ed Wood and the Hollywood Business of "Fake News(papers)" (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

Did you ever wonder about those fake newspapers in Ed Wood's movies? James did!

Ed Wood's films are celebrated by fans and lambasted by critics alike for their makeshift props and low budget set dressing. But when it came to the use of reproduction newspapers for film inserts, Ed relied on the same industry-standard production house as the big Hollywood studios. Prop newspapers have been used in place of real ones from the earliest days of commercial film since they avoid copyright or legal restrictions while providing a budget-conscious resource for productions that cannot afford to license real products. And the supplier in Hollywood that most everyone has turned to for over a hundred years is the Earl Hays Press, the oldest prop house in existence.

Earl Spindler Hays was born (1892) in Pennsylvania [1]. In 1910 he made the great trek westward and immediately went to work as an apprentice printer in Los Angeles. The accepted history is that in 1915 Earl established a Hollywood print shop specializing in reproductions for the film industry. However, this is not supported by evidence to be gleaned from contemporaneous Los Angeles City Directories.

Instead, from 1910-1921, Earl worked for at least two different companies including J.F. Rowins in 1913 (430 South Broadway, building still exists) and the Western Printing Company in 1917 (631 South Spring Street, redeveloped). The First World War interrupted his career as Earl went off to serve in the U.S. Army Air Service (1917-18). He returned to Los Angeles after the war and resumed employment with the Hugo C. Jacobsmeyer Company (renamed Western Printing), which explicitly produced motion picture supplies. Earl worked as a printer and later as a salesman.

By 1922 Earl had struck out on his own with a small print shop at 5515 Santa Monica Blvd (redeveloped). He specialized in making props for the film industry and, as his business grew in leaps and bounds, repeatedly relocated his shop to larger quarters. In 1926, he moved down the block to 5533 Santa Monica Blvd (still exists). In 1932 he moved the company to 6510 Santa Monica Blvd, a one-story brick building in the heart of Hollywood that would be its home for the next decade [2]. (Current-day location of Dragonfly Hollywood – a hip-hop club which preserved the building's original brickwork and features bottle service reasonably priced at $500 - $1,400 before fees, tips and taxes [3]). 

In 1942 the Earl Hays Press relocated again – this time a few blocks down Santa Monica Blvd and around the corner to 1121 North Las Palmas (redeveloped). By 1944 Earl was employing a press writer and four printers solely dedicated to manufacturing newspapers, magazines and other printed materials for movie studios.

Throughout its history, the Earl Hays Press has produced a wealth of materials for film and television including food packages, product labels, stocks and bonds, railroad and airline tickets, birth certificates, marriage licenses, medicine labels, telegram forms, racetrack and theater programs, hotel stationery, playing cards, press cards, maps, documents, and advertisements. In short, anything that could be fashioned out of printer's ink, type, and paper. 

One of their major products down through the years has been period-correct newspapers. These reproductions can imitate anything from a high-end newspaper like The New York Times to a small-town newspaper. Budget considerations dictate to what extent the prop newspaper is customized to meet a film's plot demands. Commonly, a newspaper is produced with custom headlines while the remainder of the paper consists of nonsense text and unrelated photographs. In such cases, extreme close-ups of the paper should be avoided at all cost. 

One particular default layout that was widely repeated by the Earl Hays Press included the headline "She's 3rd Brightest But Hard Gal To See" accompanied by an image of a brunette woman in a sweater [4]. It has been spotted by attentive viewers in hundreds of films and television shows spanning a 40-year period. Another of their most widely recognized products are "Morley" cigarette packages (a nod to the Marlboro brand) [5].

From the 1950s-1960s the Earl Hays Press generated a number of newspapers (Daily Chronicle, Hollywood Chronicle, etc.) in standard seven-column format that usually bore unique eagle artwork in the masthead. These newspapers were prominently featured in Ed's film work and numerous other productions including Glen or Glenda (1953) [6], Bride of the Monster (1955) [7, 8], Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) [9], an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1956) [10], The Violent Years (1956) [11], Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) [12, 13], several episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) [14, 15, 16, 17, 18], The Sinister Urge (1960) [19], and Queen of Blood (1966) [20]. 

The Twilight Zone, in particular, was in the habit of presenting crisp, closeup views of newspapers allowing careful viewers to recognize duplicate content among the papers. Was he simply careless, or was showrunner Rod Serling purposely allowing us a view into the artificiality of his programs – perhaps as a warning about the illusory nature of narratives? At this same time, author Philip K. Dick was obsessively critiquing the explosion of spurious realities manufactured by mainstream media fearing that it would lead to a world where real and fake increasingly blurred together.

The newspapers cited are chock full of secondary headlines that regularly repeat from paper to paper.

• Citizens' Groups Demand Reduction in Transit Fares

• New Petitions Against Tax

• New Tax Bill May be Needed

• Building Code Under Fire

• Engineer is Killed As Limited Crashes

• Late News Flashes (a group of six short articles that always appear together as a block): Savant Dead in Plane; Families Rescued; U.S. Envoy Calls on Vice Premier; Plenty of Man Power; Returns Auto, Admits Slaying; American Warned Out

• Contests Delay Choice of New City Chairman

• Volunteer Committee Is Selected To Help Social Service Group

• Gem Thieves Strike in London Fog

• Court Seeks Adjournment

• Strong Opposition To Proposed Tax Legislation

• Board Of Education Submits New School Bonds Issue

• Sir Haven Wins Annual Classic

• Trio Arrested, $200 Robbery

Glen or Glenda (1953) contains an additional newspaper insert closeup [21] that was inadvisable by post-1990s standards as technological advances allow us to examine the composite text in a way that was simply impossible for previous generations of viewers. Careful study of this insert reveals the presence of the following elements [22]:

A color-coded breakdown of the Glen or Glenda newspaper.

• The main headline centered in the view ("Man Nabbed Dressed as Girl") has clearly been pasted onto a prop newspaper.

• A secondary headline at the top and often obscured ("Picard Will Defend His Title At Quaker Ridge on Thursday Against Brilliant Field") is a reference to Henry Picard [23], one of the leading PGA Tour golfers in the 1930s-1940s, defending his Metropolitan Open title in 1940 at Quaker Ridge Golf Course in Scarsdale, NY.

• The text in the blue box comes from an article in the Waterloo Region Record (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; 16 December 1938) about Monsignor William Godfrey, the Catholic Church's newly appointed apostolic delegate to Great Britain [24].

• The text in the green box comes from an article in the Ithaca (NY) Journal (13 December 1938) about NY State Grange leader Raymond Cooper (name changed to Connors) denouncing violence between farmers and labor organizations [25].

• The text in the orange boxes describes a prison stabbing (source unknown).

• The text in the yellow boxes comes from an article in the Daily Herald (London, 23 November 1938) relating legal proceedings against 15-year-old French faith healer Andree Maurel (name changed to Anna) [26].

• The source of the remaining text could not be identified due to its fragmentary nature.

Earl Hays retired in the 1960s (passing away in 1975) and sold the shop to William Bailey. By the end of the decade, Bailey sold it to employee Ralph Hernandez, Sr. The Hernandez family continues to run the Earl Hays Press today. In the 1980s, they relocated to 10707 Sherman Way in Sun Valley just above Bob Hope (Hollywood Burbank) International Airport. While they've had several competitors over the years, none have possessed the wealth of fonts, woodblocks, and tens of thousands of historical periodicals that allow the Earl Hays Press to quickly generate period-correct items. In the 2000s, the company fully transitioned to digital production. In 2019 the International Printing Museum (Carson, CA) acquired an extensive collection of rare antique metal typefaces, wooden print blocks, and printed materials from the Earl Hays Press to ensure that they are preserved.

Sources:

• 1910 – 1940 United States Federal Census, National Archives and Records Administration.

• International Printing Museum (www.printmuseum.org).

• Los Angeles City Directory 1910-1956, Los Angeles City Directory Company.

• "Ambassador Has Dual Functions," Waterloo Region Record (Kitchener, Ontario), 16 December 1938. [Many thanks to Wood-fan Shawn D. Langrick for locating this item!]

• "Down the Aisle," Dayton (OH) Daily News, 12 November 1939.

• "Earl Hays Press: Where Hollywood gets fake money and newspapers," BBC News, 23 February 2017.

• "Girl Age Fifteen 'Cured' 20,000: Will Be Tried As Bogus Doctor," Daily Herald (London), 23 November 1938.

• "Grange Leader Deplores Labor Tiffs," Ithaca (NY) Journal, 13 December 1938.

• "Hidden Taxes Cut Profits of Farmer, Cooper Warns," The Buffalo News, 13 December 1938.

• "How the same paper ended up in hundreds of films," News.com.au., October 29, 2015.

• Props To History: S1E1 "Earl Hays Press and the Recurring Newspaper," [YouTube link].