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| A Texas sheriff investigates the seamy underbelly of Paris in the unproduced Rue Pigalle. |
"I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It’s a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other."-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
In many ways, Ed Wood's kinky crime novel Parisian Passions (1966) serves as a companion piece to the film Orgy of the Dead (1965), which Eddie scripted for producer-director Stephen C. Apostolof. They're from the same era of Ed's career and feature a lot of the same phrases, like "it would seem..." and "evening's pleasure." As I was making my way through Parisian Passions, I kept thinking, "Hmmm. That sounds like a line from Orgy of the Dead. It's almost like these two things were written back-to-back." Which they basically were. We'll get into it.
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| Parisian Passions and Orgy of the Dead. |
Beyond their superficial similarities, these two works are linked thematically. Both of these stories are built around the idea that so-called "night people" engage in wicked, sinful acts while all the decent people are in bed asleep. In Parisian Passions, undercover cop Buck Rhodes is forced to witness such shameful rituals while overseas on a murder case but does not partake of them. (Heaven forfend!) In Orgy of the Dead, straight-laced couple Bob (William Bates) and Shirley (Pat Barrington) are likewise compelled to witness some supernatural debauchery, but they do so strictly from the sidelines.
As it turns out, Parisian Passions would likely not exist at all without Orgy of the Dead. In 1966, after striking a distribution deal for Orgy with a company called F.O.G., director Stephen C. Apostolof received three checks totaling $15,000 (nearly $150K in today's money) from the company's founder, Fred O. Gebhardt. Like any true red-blooded filmmaker, Steve immediately made plans to take that money and invest it in several new productions. These productions would need scripts, and Steve turned to Ed Wood because he knew Eddie could write something very quickly. The result was a screenplay called 7 Rue Pigalle, which centers around a Texas sheriff investigating a series of murders in the red-light district of Paris.
This strange, never-to-be-completed project has surprisingly deep roots. From 1948 to 1950, after fleeing his native Bulgaria and briefly dwelling in Istanbul, Steve Apostolof actually lived in Paris. He remembered his address there as being 7 Rue Pigalle. There is, in fact, a street in Paris named after sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785). The surrounding neighborhood, the Quartier Pigalle, became a notorious tourist trap in the 20th century due to its numerous sex shops and adult theaters. During World War II, American soldiers even started calling it "Pig Alley." (The pun only works in English; the French word for pig is cochon.)
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| The actual 7 Rue Pigalle. Yes, it's a real address in Paris. |
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| Steve's Variety ad from 1956. |
Obviously, that film never came to be, and Stephen C. Apostolof wouldn't make his directorial debut until Orgy of the Dead nearly a decade later. But Steve didn't let go of the title 7 Rue Pigalle. Instead, he commissioned a new script by that same name from Ed Wood in 1966. As far as I know, the plot that Eddie came up with for this version of the project had no connection, other than the title and the geographical setting, to the abandoned 7 Rue Pigalle from the 1950s. Indeed, the surviving Pigalle script credits the "original story and screenplay" to Ed Wood.
Unfortunately, Fred O. Gebhardt's checks bounced, and all the films that Steve Apostolof had in the works were instantly canceled, including Pigalle. Disappointed and disillusioned, Steve stuck with the filmmaking business but became his own distributor. No more middle men. The incident with Gebhardt is what led to the founding of Steve's own releasing company, SCA Films. Ultimately, this proved to be a good thing for Ed Wood. In the 1970s, Steve would again hire Eddie to work on various SCA projects, from Drop Out Wife (1972) to Hot Ice (1978). But that's a whole other story.
Ed Wood wasn't one to throw away perfectly good, saleable material, so he turned the abandoned Rue Pigalle script into the Parisian Passions novel that I reviewed last week. Eddie truly made the material his own, expanding the bare-bones plot of the screenplay and incorporating more of his own fetishes, neuroses, and obsessions into it. He even changed the name of the protagonist from Sheriff Tex Strong to Sheriff Buck Rhodes in tribute to his own childhood hero, cowboy actor Buck Jones. Moreover, in novel form, Ed was able to incorporate the flashbacks and philosophical digressions he so loved as a writer. Also, adult paperbacks were not subject to scrutiny from censors nearly as much as theatrically-released films were in the 1960s, so Parisian Passions explores some dark alleys that 7 Rue Pigalle would not have been able to.
But what about that unproduced screenplay? It's been circulating on the internet for some time, and it's a valuable artifact in and of itself. For one thing, in addition to numerous handwritten annotations throughout the document, it contains a detailed cast list and even a shooting schedule, so it seems like Steve and Ed really thought this movie was going to happen. It's also notable that, whenever the film's title appears, the "7" is handwritten while "Rue Pigalle" is typed. Perhaps Ed Wood thought the title was simply Rue Pigalle. Or perhaps he and Steve tried different numbers in the title; I've seen this project referred to as 69 Rue Pigalle in some sources. That suggestive title might have caused problems when buying newspaper advertisements, however. Lord knows Steve had enough headaches trying to advertise a film called Orgy of the Dead.
The proposed cast for 7 Rue Pigalle includes numerous folks from Orgy of the Dead, including William Bates as protagonist Tex Strong, John Bealey as Inspector Goulet, choreographer Mark Desmond as the tour guide Pierre, Bill Bonner as a waiter, and hulking Lou Ojena as prime suspect Jacques. Orgy producer Neil Stein was to have played a gendarme. Most intriguing of all, Ed Wood himself was going to have an onscreen role as a master of ceremonies. I'd have loved to see Eddie act in this. Meanwhile, anyone who has seen William Bates' awkward performance in Orgy of the Dead will be surprised to learn that Steve was going to trust him with dialogue a second time.
Plotwise, 7 Rue Pigalle reads like a condensed, sanitized version of Parisian Passions. The film script hits most of the major story beats from the novel. To wit:
- A sheriff from Texas visits Paris and is enlisted by Inspector Goulet of the Surete to catch a modern day Jack the Ripper-type killer who is stalking the red light district.
- The sheriff goes undercover and pretends to be a rich playboy looking for fun and thrills.
- He hires a tour guide named Pierre to show him around Paris. Pierre then takes him to various shady nightclubs.
- A star performer named Monette is murdered, and her lover Jacques is suspected of the crime.
- The sheriff comes up with a wild plan to catch the killer. The police will set up a phony sex club and lure the killer out of hiding by featuring a new performer.
- The new performer is Lorry/Lorraine, a female impersonator that the sheriff knows from America.
- The plan works brilliantly! The female impersonator proves irresistible. The killer attacks (but does not kill) Lorry.
- The killer attempts to evade the police but ultimately plunges to his death and is unmasked.
- The sheriff, Lorry, and Goulet celebrate a job well done.
So it's definitely recognizable as an early, embryonic version of Parisian Passions. But what are the major differences? Well, the most obvious is that the sheriff and Pierre only go to run-of-the-mill strip clubs in the screenplay, not the truly decadent sex clubs of the novel. There are no mentions of drugs in the script either, and Jacques is no longer a pusher. We are denied any flashbacks about the characters' pasts. Lorry just seems like a nice, helpful young man who happens to be a female impersonator. And the climactic three-way between Lorry, Goulet, and the sheriff is nowhere to be seen. All in all, it seems like Steve Apostolof's plan for 7 Rue Pigalle was to film a lot of topless burlesque acts, throw in some stock footage of Paris, and frame it all as a police procedural.
Were we truly denied a cinematic masterpiece when 7 Rue Pigalle lost its funding? It's tough to say. Had the film been made, it would have been an unofficial sequel of sorts to Orgy of the Dead, featuring much of the same cast and crew. But Ed Wood kept a lot of his weirder, wilder tendencies in check when he penned this screenplay, which dulls its impact somewhat. Apart from a few eccentric touches, like Pierre's rambling diatribe about the "night people," this is a fairly standard 1960s softcore flick. (Notably, the "night people vs. day people" material from this script got ported over to Parisian Passions basically intact.)
As you read 7 Rue Pigalle, keep in mind that director Steve Apostolof needed to release a commercially-viable film based on this material. He was trying to make money, not art. There are numerous paragraphs crossed out in this already-brief screenplay, and I imagine that this was the result of Steve cutting any material he felt was superfluous. Eddie envisioned the film ending with a cameo by Criswell, for instance, but it looks like Steve vetoed that idea. This is likely because Cris had been such a headache for Steve on the set of Orgy of the Dead.
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| Ed Wood wanted to have Criswell in the picture; Steve Apostolof disagreed. |
Stephen C. Apostolof was a businessman at heart. He knew that time was money, so he didn't want to slow down filming for any nonsense like that. But, as Willy Wonka taught us all, "A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men." So let's be grateful that Eddie got to revisit this material in the novel Parisian Passions and used that opportunity to indulge in all of his best and worst tendencies as a writer. Sloppy as it may be, the novel gets closer to the muddled mind of Edward D. Wood, Jr. than the screenplay that spawned it.