REPOST: A day spent (vicariously) with Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer: Mathematician turned singer-songwriter turned mathematician again.

NOTE: Today, we received the sad news that singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer had died at the age of 97. In light of that, I would like to repost an article about Tom that I wrote back in 2012.

Tom Lehrer would scoff at the idea of being anyone's hero. This is part of the reason why he's one of mine.

A native New Yorker born way back in 1928 (one shudders to do the grim calculations here), Lehrer was a child prodigy who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19. Since that time, he has spent most of his career either teaching or lecturing about mathematics at some of America's finest academic institutions, including MIT and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He formally retired in 2001, but he's still listed at the Rate My Professors website with a student review as recent as 2005.

Latter-day Lehrer

What sets Tom Lehrer apart from other mathematicians, apart from his claim of inventing the Jell-O shot, is that he devoted much of his time in the 1950s and 1960s to writing and performing some of the darkest, funniest songs I've ever heard -- deceptively joyous musical theater-type ditties with droll, sardonic lyrics about such topics as sex ("I Got It From Agnes"), drugs ("The Old Dope Peddler"), violence ("The Masochism Tango"), religion ("The Vatican Rag"), death ("I Hold Your Hand in Mine") and war ("So Long, Mom") with a candor that set him far apart from both the singers and the comedians of that era. Today, comedians can joke openly about pornography, incest, cannibalism, bestiality, and necrophilia on prime time network television, but this wasn't true 60 years ago when Tom's records couldn't even be played on the radio during respectable hours.

As with much of the music that now clutters up my brain, the bizarre and sometimes brutal song stylings of Tom Lehrer first entered my life through The Dr. Demento Show. This was back in the 1990s, before the internet was any damned good, and it was difficult to come by information about Tom's life or career back then. I couldn't even find a picture of the guy! I knew instinctively, though, that he wore glasses. Somehow, that was obvious to me. His myopia was audible. 

Despite the apparent rudeness of his lyrics, Mr. Lehrer conducted himself with the utmost decorum onstage, using impeccable Ivy League diction, eclectic and impressive vocabulary, and carefully-curated grammar. On his records, he comes across as man far too smart to take life the least bit seriously. Lerher's musical career occurred during the Cold War when it seemed ever-more-likely that mankind would annihilate itself with increasingly-deadly weapons. This looming apocalypse is the topic of several Lehrer songs, and he treats it the way he treats all other subjects: with an air of detached amusement at the absurdity of it all.

Tom Lehrer's 1953 debut

Today, almost two decades after I first heard "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," (the song that made me a fan) I spent some quality time listening to virtually every Tom Lehrer recording available to the public. That's not a great investment of time, honestly. There are roughly three hours of Lehrer audio in total, nearly all of it consisting of Tom singing solo and accompanying himself on piano. 

His musical output boils down to two brief studio albums (Songs by Tom Lehrer and More of Tom Lehrer), three live albums (Revisited [a.k.a. Tom Lehrer in Concert], An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, and That Was the Week That Was), plus a handful of miscellaneous recordings. He recorded a handful of his most famous songs with a full orchestra, for instance, plus he did a few well-remembered educational songs (like "Silent E") for a PBS children's program called The Electric Company. There are a few good CD compilations out there of Lehrer's work, but buyers should know in advance that the same exact songs from the two studio albums are heard on his first two live LPs as well. And I mean, they're note-for-note the same. If you buy the boxed set with his "complete" recordings, be prepared to sit through the same songs two or even three times.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 237: The not-so-endless reaches of time

No matter who you are, time is coming to get you.

Ed Wood died at 54. My colleague Greg Javer, who researched the life and work of Ed Wood, died at 56. My own mother died at 46, her father at 54. I turn 50 in a couple of months. I am acutely aware that my time is rapidly running out. You know the scene in The Wizard of Oz (1939) in which Margaret Hamilton shows Judy Garland a giant hourglass full of red sand?

"Do you see that?" she yells, turning the hourglass upside down. "That's how much longer you've got to be alive, and it isn't long, my pretty! It isn't long!"

Cut to Judy Garland, sobbing in mute horror. That's how I feel right now.

I'm currently working a full-time cubicle job as a clerk at a mortgage company. Most days, I come home from the office feeling like garbage and not wanting to do much of anything. In what spare time I have, mostly nights and weekends, I do a biweekly podcast and maintain this blog. If you're reading this article, you probably think that I only write about Ed Wood. In fact, you may think this entire blog is called "Ed Wood Wednesdays." It isn't, but I've stopped correcting people on that point. 

SIDEBAR: The name of this blog is Dead 2 Rights. "Ed Wood Wednesdays" is a series of articles on that blog, sort of like how Saturday Night Live (1975- ) is a series on NBC. Most weeks, the Ed Wood stuff on D2R isn't even what gets the most clicks. My articles about Fat Albert, What's My Line, and Patience & Prudence consistently outperform Ed. In fact, of the ten most-viewed articles in the entire history of this blog, only two are about Ed Wood. And one of those is the index page.

Podcast Tuesday: "Frankie Goes to Johnnywood"

Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino in Garry Marshall's Frankie & Johnny.

Director Garry Marshall and playwright Terrence McNally both faced professional challenges in 1991. Garry's challenge was following up the biggest movie of his career, Pretty Woman (1990). Terrence's challenge was taking his humble, two-character play Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987) and expanding it into a major motion picture featuring two enormous stars, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino.

As it happens, Marshall and McNally were working on the same project: the $29 million Paramount production Frankie & Johnny (1991). Perhaps wary of trying to top Pretty Woman, Marshall opted to tell the humble story of a chef named Johnny (Pacino) and a waitress named Frankie (Pfeiffer) who meet at the New York diner where they both work and embark upon a romantic relationship. Johnny sees Frankie as his soulmate and wants to pursue a serious relationship. Frankie's been hurt before and wants to keep things casual. Who prevails? Have you seen a movie before?

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're reviewing Frankie & Johnny. We talk about the film, the play, New York diners, "Love Shack," and many other topics. We'd be very pleased and happy if you'd join us.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 236: Plan 9: The Cemetery Screening (2025)

What's the weirdest place you've ever seen a movie?

Sometimes, the place where you see a movie can make all the difference. 

A very special screening.

I hope I will never forget seeing Citizen Kane (1941) at the magnificent Fox Theatre in Detroit or The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) at the crumbling Capitol Theatre in Flint. Then there's Chicago's historic Music Box, where I saw The Wizard of Oz (1939), Brand on the Brain (2006), and Inland Empire (2006). Magnificent experiences all. During Inland Empire, the theater was so cold I kept my winter coat on all three hours!

But I can also remember seeing Do the Right Thing (1989) at the long-gone Genesee Valley Cinema in Flint. This was a perfectly ordinary multiplex, but I happened to be there on a night when the air conditioning was on the fritz and the theater was sweltering, allowing us in the audience to experience some of what the characters onscreen were going through. My mother took me to see that film, and we had a long discussion afterwards about the characters and the choices they made.

Occasionally, the venue where you see a movie isn't even a theater at all. My first, transformative viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), for instance, took place on a long bus trip to Indiana when I was a teenager. And I vividly remember watching the Suspiria (2018) reboot on an Amtrak train and being absolutely enraptured by it. Somehow, in both of those examples, being in motion made the viewing experience more intense. 

Ed Wood fans in the Los Angeles area have an opportunity later this month to view the director's most famous film in a highly memorable and most appropriate setting. On Saturday, July 26, 2025 at 6:30pm, the San Fernando Valley Historical Society (SFVHS) is hosting a screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) at the Pioneer Memorial Cemetery in Sylmar, CA. This, in case you didn't know, is the very cemetery where Eddie actually shot some scenes for the film! Director Mark Carducci visited this cemetery for his documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood (1992), as did film critic Harry Medved for an episode of his PBS series Locationland (2025). The SFVHS is holding this screening to honor the 100th anniversary of Ed Wood's birth.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 235: "The Mads Are Back: Bride of the Monster" (2022)

Some lovely artwork by Carmen Cerra for Bride of the Monster.

Much like Dracula, Mystery Science Theater 3000 will never die.

Sure, the long-running comedy series seems to be in limbo for now, with no new "official" episodes produced since December 2022. But the comedians and writers who worked on MST3K have launched similar series of their own and are still wisecracking their way through a wide variety of movies and shorts. In 2020, for example, MST3K veterans Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff launched a pay-per-view web series called The Mads Are Back. It started as a way for Trace and Frank to continue their touring act during the global pandemic, but they've kept the web series going to this very day, amassing four seasons and half a dozen specials so far.

You'd probably expect the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to be a part of any series like this, and, true to form, Beaulieu and Conniff have riffed both Glen or Glenda (1953) and Night of the Ghouls (1959) for The Mads Are Back. I was especially interested in screening those episodes because neither film had ever been covered on MST3K proper. On the other hand, I was aware of the fact that Beaulieu and Conniff had also riffed Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955) in 2022. That movie had already been used on MST3K—way back in January 1993, during the show's fourth season on Comedy Central—so I was not as keen to see Bride of the Monster riffed on The Mads Are Back. I mean, what else is there to say about this film?

Podcast Tuesday: "Attractive Female"

Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

As my cohost and I have made our way through the films of Garry Marshall, I've been reminded time and again of just how different media consumption was in the 1980s and '90s. For one thing, I saw a lot more movies in the theater back then, at least three or four each month. These days, I'll see maybe two or three movies a year on the big screen.

Another big difference was that, in the days before streaming, we were reliant on VHS tapes if we wanted to screen a film at home. Most we rented, a few we owned. This system wasn't all bad. My sister and I had our own VHS copy of Garry Marshall's smash romcom Pretty Woman (1990) and watched it dozens of times. That film simply became part of our consciousness, and we quoted it frequently.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about Pretty Woman. The film was extremely popular in its own time, but how does it hold up in ours? Well, click below to find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 234: Something Weird Video Catalog #1 (1995-1996)

If you needed some Ed Wood movies in the '90s, SWV could hook you up.

In the 1990s, there was a tremendous resurgence of interest in Edward D. Wood, Jr. and his films, spurred by the release of Rudolph Grey's oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) and Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood (1994). Naturally, people wanted to see Eddie's infamous movies for themselves, but the films weren't always easily accessible for on-demand viewing—certainly not to the extent that they are today. This was still the golden age of physical media, so fans were reliant on VHS tapes and, later, DVDs. If you wanted to watch something, you had to own or rent a copy of it.

Wanna watch some weird movies?

Numerous companies stepped in to distribute Ed's movies on home video during this time. In the past, I've argued that Los Angeles' Rhino Home Video was the most significant of these companies. Their Ed Wood releases, complete with faux-retro "Ed Wood Collection" stickers, seemed to occupy the most shelf space at retail outlets like Suncoast, Best Buy, and Sam Goody. My personal Ed Wood indoctrination came through Rhino releases, and I'm positive that the first feature-length Wood documentary I ever saw was Rhino's charmingly kitschy Look Back in Angora (1994). So the company has a special place in my heart. This series of articles might not exist without it. 

But, through years of researching this column, I've learned that there was another quirky home video company in the '90s that played a significant role in finding and releasing Ed Wood's movies. I'm referring to Seattle's legendary Something Weird Video. 

If you're a cult movie fan of any caliber whatsoever, then it's a near-certainty that SWV has been an important part of your movie education. The company specializes in preserving movies that were previously considered worthless, bottom-of-the-barrel junk: low-budget horror, exploitation, and sexploitation films, mainly from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Thanks to SWV, the films of Doris Wishman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Harry Novak, Barry Mahon, Coffin Joe, and more found a new audience among '90s film freaks. And the company has never given up on that mission, even after the death of founder Mike Vraney in 2014. In 2025, conceding to the times, SWV relaunched as a streaming service on the Cultpix website.

In the company's earliest days, long before its "Special Edition" DVDs were available in stores, Something Weird Video was basically a mail-order company. Recently, in the Ed Wood Jr. Facebook forum, Jordan Rapoza posted an excerpt from SWV's first-ever catalog from 1995. After a little digging, I found that the entire catalog had been uploaded to the Internet Archive. To say the least, it's a pretty incredible document, one that instantly transported me back to the days when I was scouring Usenet forums and fanzines for any information I could get about these bizarre, "forbidden" films. I wish I'd held onto more of the catalogs and advertising flyers from those days. Luckily, others did!

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Polo Shirt Odyssey (Guest Author: W. Paul Apel)

What does this humble garment have to do with Ed Wood? Let's find out!

As long as he’s been infamous, Ed Wood has always been linked with clothing. The "worst director of all time" bit has gone hand in hand with the cross-dressing bit since the beginning of his rediscovery in the '80s, almost as if one is a bonus added punchline to the other. Not only did this guy direct Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), goes the legend, but he did it in an angora sweater.

Much has been written about Eddie's passion for women's clothing, including a lot by Eddie himself. He started his career with the semi-autobiographical plea for tolerance, Glen or Glenda (1953), and ended it with stacks of adult paperbacks filled with cross-dressing and gender-bending characters, each clad in outfits Eddie never failed to describe in loving, microscopic detail.

Very little, by comparison, has been written, whether about or by Eddie, concerning men's clothing. And that's the corner of Eddie's closet I’d like to get into today. Let's push aside Eddie's alter ego Shirley's sizable wardrobe and look at what he wore by day. Specifically, his polo shirts.

This odyssey all began with one of the aforementioned adult paperbacks, an adaptation of the Wood-scripted Steven Apostolof flick Orgy of the Dead (1965). Ever since I first read in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) that this feature length series of striptease acts had been improbably adapted into a piece of literature by Wood himself, and saw the striking cover art by Robert Bonfils, I knew I had to own my own copy someday.

When that day finally came, decades later, I was struck by an oddity among the many photo illustrations. I had heard the tale of how Eddie had absconded with publicity stills taken on the set of Orgy by Robert Charles Wilson for use in this publication, but I wasn't expecting to see, inexplicably, a photo of Eddie himself right there on page 107.

Podcast Tuesday: "TRUE STORY: I'm in a Happy Days Documentary"

Am I an official Cunningham now? No, but I can dream.

I've been putting original content on the internet for over 30 years now, most of it totally for free. I started posting on Usenet newsgroups and AOL forums in the mid-1990s, and I've never stopped creating material (songs, scripts, stories, etc.)  and trying to get it out to the world somehow. It's really just an evolution of what I was doing in junior high and high school. In my pre-internet days, I made little hand-drawn comics and passed them around class. I also wrote for the school newspaper. You'd think the internet would connect me with a much larger audience than I had back then, but so far that's not really been the case. My appeal has always been extremely limited, bordering on nonexistent.

I suppose I hoped that, eventually, something I made would catch on and I'd garner some kind of following. It just never happened for me, though, at least not on any grand scale. Whatever the zeitgeist is, I've never captured it. About a decade ago, I briefly made an attempt at being a professional freelance writer. I got some things published, but again success eluded me. Then, the work dried up altogether and I had to give it up. Still in all, I've been doing this blog since 2009 and These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast since 2018, and I have no plans to stop either one of them any time soon. I'll keep creating and releasing this stuff for as long as I can, even if my only audience is myself.

These days, I'm always surprised and grateful when anyone reads anything I've written, listens to anything I've recorded, or watches anything I've filmed. It's not often that people find my work, but I'm happy when they do. Recently, I was contacted by a production company that was making a documentary about Happy Days for CBS. I'm not exactly sure how they found me, but they did, and they asked me to be a part of their show. This was pretty extraordinary. This week on the podcast, I talk about that experience and what I learned from it. If you're interested in hearing it, just press the play button on the episode below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 233: Let's endure Ed Wood's 'Devil Cult' (1973)

This young lady is either having a great time or a terrible one in Ed Wood's Devil Cult.

I don't know sometimes, you guys.

Since my colleague Greg Javer died last December, I've occasionally found myself wondering what kind of articles he would have written for this series if he had lived. It's impossible to say, since Greg's interests went in so many different directions. There was no aspect of Ed Wood's life or career that escaped his attention. At any given time, Greg might have been pursuing a dozen different threads simultaneously. Occasionally, I'd nag him into turning something he was exploring into an article that I could actually publish on my blog. And he would.

Quite a few of Greg's articles dealt with the loops, i.e. the short, usually silent 8mm pornographic films (both gay and straight), that Ed Wood made in the 1970s. Eddie wrote and/or directed many of these films himself, and especially "hot" scenes from his features like The Young Marrieds (1972) and The Only House in Town (1970) were also marketed separately as loops. These short films were generally sold through mail-order—and none too cheaply, either—so that viewers with their own projectors and screens could watch them in privacy at home. Hey, this was life before the internet, folks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 232: Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future (2023)

Want a whole lotta Criswell in one book? 

Criswell was the Liberace of futurists. 

Liberace: The Criswell of music?

There are so many connections between these strange, mid-20th-century entertainers, even though one predicted the future (dubiously) and the other played the piano (flamboyantly). Criswell and Liberace—one bisexual, the other gay, both products of the Midwest—were popular during roughly the same time period, from the 1950s to the 1970s. They both went by catchy, one-word monikers. They both favored flashy tuxedos and fancifully-coiffed hair. They were both fixtures of the TV talk show circuit. They were both widely parodied and mocked but didn't seem to care as long as they kept making money. 

Above all, Lee and Cris related to their fans in very similar ways. In fact, I think there's significant overlap between the Liberace audience and the Criswell audience. I picture a lot of middle-aged and older ladies with impatient, irritated husbands.

"Honestly, Gladys, I don't get what you see in that fruitcake!"

Liberace is actually name-checked numerous times in Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell (2023), Edwin Lee Canfield's thorough biography of the famed Indiana-born prognosticator. But Canfield oversaw another Criswell book in 2023. Together with Charles Phillip Wireman, he compiled a generous volume called Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future. I see Accurate Glimpse as a companion or supplementary volume to Forbidden Predictions. When you read about Cris' life, you'll likely want to explore the man's work in further detail. Accurate Glimpse draws material from Criswell's many books, audio recordings, magazine articles, and newspaper columns. The editors pop in from time to time to offer some historical context.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Teaches of Beaches"

Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler in Beaches.

Remember the so-called "monoculture"? If you grew up in the 1980s or earlier, you certainly do. Back then, due to the constraints of technology and commerce, we mostly consumed the same media at the same time as everyone else. Whatever the "big" movies and TV shows were, that's what we watched. Whatever was in the Top 40, that's what we listened to. This may not sound like an ideal system, but it gave us a common frame of reference. When we talked about "the media" in the abstract, we were referring to the same material. Cable and home video started to erode the monoculture just a bit in the '80s, but the '90s was when the entertainment world truly started splintering into a lot of little hyper-specific facets.

Nowadays, thanks to the internet and the rise of personal devices like smartphones and tablets (meant to be used by an individual rather than a group), the entertainment we consume is well-tailored to our various demographic groups and delivered to us by algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. We stay in our lanes, culturally speaking, and it's considered "weird" (read; undesirable) to do otherwise. In 2025, it's very possible to have a supposed "hit" song that most of the country has never heard or a "hit" TV show that most of the country isn't even aware of. If it's not intended for you, it generally doesn't reach you. I suppose the last vestiges of the monoculture are the big franchise films that dominate the box office: the sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of familiar intellectual properties.

Director Garry Marshall's fifth film, Beaches (1988)—a tearjerking melodrama starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as lifelong friends with clashing personalities—is a definite product of the monoculture. Produced by Walt Disney's Touchstone Pictures division, it's a film designed to appeal to the widest-possible audience. And it did just that! Not only was the film a hit in theaters and on video, it launched a massive hit single ("Wind Beneath My Wings") and led to one of its cast members (Mayim Bialik) getting her own prime time sitcom. I don't think any of this would be remotely possible in 2025. Today, a film like Beaches, if it got made at all, would be shuffled off to a streaming service and quickly forgotten. Indeed, a 2017 remake of the film went straight to cable and was largely ignored.

So Beaches is a reminder of who we once were and of what pop culture used to be. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? We'll try to figure all that out as we review it in the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 231: Catching up with some recent reader feedback

What can I say? I love a cheap pun.

I have some very knowledgeable and attentive readers. This is mostly a good thing, but it can be a little worrying sometimes. Niche fandoms tend to attract people who are passionate and detail-oriented when it comes to their chosen subject matter, so I know that some complaints and corrections are (potentially) headed my way whenever I post a new article in this series. For the most part, however, Ed Wood's dedicated fans have been extremely generous in sharing books, articles, scripts, videos, photographs, and more with me. I'm truly grateful for that. Many articles in this series have come about because of the items people have sent me or because of the information they've shared with me.

Generally, the day I post a new Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I'll mention it on my various social media accounts, including the very active Ed Wood Jr. Facebook forum moderated by Bob Blackburn. These Facebook posts often inspire some interesting and informative responses. But social media is, by its very nature, ephemeral, so I wanted to document some of these responses before they evaporate forever from my memory.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 230: The Mortician's Tale (1966-1968)

Something about this particular story must have really captured Ed Wood's imagination.

Early in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a psychotic hitchhiker (Ed Neal) explains to a vanload of horrified hippies how the delicacy known as "head cheese" is made:

They take the head [of the cow] and they boil it, except for the tongue, and they scrape all the flesh away from the bone. They use everything. They don't throw nothing away. They use the jowls and the muscles and the eyes and the ligaments and everything! From the nose and the gums and all the flesh, and they boil it down into a big jelly of fats!

Ed Neal as the hitchhiker.

Ed Wood could definitely relate to this. Both his films and his writings have that distinct "head cheese" quality to them. If Eddie could help it, he didn't throw anything away either. He'd shamelessly recycle dialogue, plots, character names, and whatever he had on hand. He was so frugal that he edited footage from three separate, failed projects into his film Night of the Ghouls (1959) even though most of it clearly didn't belong there. And he'd occasionally publish short stories that were thin rewrites of stories he'd published only months before! In summary, he just took all the material he had available to him, the jowls and ligaments, and boiled it down into a big jelly of fats. Waste not, want not.

There is one particular plot that turns up at least three times in Ed Wood's literary canon, and it's a perfect metaphor for how Eddie worked. It tells of a disreputable mortician who bilks grieving families out of their money and blatantly abuses the helpless corpses placed in his care, sometimes for profit, sometimes just for fun. To put it mildly, this guy is a real scumbag: a liar, a thief, a necrophile, and a desecrator of graves. Even though he is eventually found out and must face the consequences of his actions, his story still leaves us with a feeling of disgust. And Ed Wood kept returning to that story! I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in more places that I just haven't found yet! But why? What, exactly, was the appeal of this story?

Well, let's examine it. As far as I know, we first meet this dastardly scoundrel in Chapter Twelve of Orgy of the Dead (Greenleaf, 1966), Ed Wood's patchwork novelization of his film script from the previous year. As I explained in my review of that book, the mortician is just one of the deceased individuals being judged by the Emperor, a mysterious cloaked figure who rules over the underworld and who holds court in a spooky cemetery on a moonlit night. Most of the other "defendants" in the novel are imported from Wood's short stories, but our mortician friend is a new creation.

The Orgy novel.

In Orgy, the mortician is identified as Lyle Carriage, a "cocky," well-dressed man of 45. He's so arrogant, in fact, that the Emperor has to scold him for being too familiar. Lyle says that he was considered "worse than a killer" and that his story received (in a rare Woodian acknowledgement of Vietnam) "more newspaper space than the war." He started out as a physician but was unable to make much money in that profession. Then, fatefully, he inherited a funeral parlor from his uncle. The only other employee besides himself was an elderly embalmer. Fortunately, Lyle's medical training made the job a natural fit for him.

On his first day at the funeral parlor, Lyle was overwhelmed by the sight of a deceased young woman in her late teens. This may have been the first indication of the mortician's latent perversities. Typical of an Ed Wood character, he obsessed over the woman's appearance and outfit. He became especially fixated on a handkerchief he used to wipe some makeup off the woman's face.

After a few months, Lyle began to hatch a scheme. He bought a nearby cemetery, forced the embalmer into retirement, and hired a couple of local drunks (similar to the characters from "To Kill a Saturday Night") to be his gravediggers. He also started convincing families to hold closed-casket funerals for their loved ones. That way, he was free to exploit the corpses. He sold their hair, their blood, and even their internal organs. Eventually, he started removing the flesh from the bones. That way he had two more saleable commodities: skeletons and meat. He especially enjoyed mutilating the bodies of "young girls" and then wearing their clothes. All the while, coffins full of rocks were being buried five or six deep in his cemetery.

It was quite a profitable operation, but it couldn't last. One day, while Lyle was chopping up another young woman and wearing her clothes, one of the drunken gravediggers staggered into his office. The other gravedigger had just recently died, and his sentimental coworker wanted "one last look at his buddy." Upon making the horrible discovery, the surviving drunk notified the police. After posting bail, Lyle decided to abscond with some money he had hidden away in one of the coffins he had buried. That's when a bony hand reached up from beyond the grave and dragged Lyle down to hell. The Emperor sentences the mortician to a most cruel fate: he shall forevermore be forced to wear a "frilly pink dress" that is "tattered, decaying, [and] crawling with grave mold and worms." The phony funeral director runs screaming into the woods. Interestingly, Lyle has become a "little man" by the end of the chapter. He'd been tall at the beginning of it.

The mortician's gruesome story resembles not only Night of the Ghouls, in which conman Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) inadvertently provokes the wrath of the dead, but also the long-unproduced I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1997), which also revolves around some money hidden in a coffin, plus the short story "In the Stony Lonesome" (1972). Interestingly, when he's digging up the coffin, Lyle uses a lighted match to see what he's doing, just as Officer Kelton (Paul Marco) does while rooting around in Inspector Clay's grave in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

Podcast Tuesday: "Stockholm Syndrome: The Romantic Comedy!"

Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn in Overboard.

Boy, were we obsessed with money in the 1980s! It was all we ever thought about, apart from sex, drugs, leg warmers, video games, and the music of Adam Ant. 

Admittedly, we humans have been obsessed with money ever since it was invented about five-thousand years ago, but our fixation on the topic hit a new high during the Reagan-Bush years. Or a new low, depending on your point of view. Either way, the subject dominated popular culture across all media in the '80s. On the radio, we'd hear "Money for Nothing," "Big Time," "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)," and "Material Girl." On television, we'd tune into capitalist fantasies like Dallas, Dynasty, Diff'rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. These shows taught us that, with enough cash in your bank account, you could live as you please and make your most vulgar consumerist dreams come true. And we bought into it!

But the movies outdid them all! Year after year, Hollywood gave us silly, over-the-top comedies about the extremely wealthy, often showcasing how they reacted to being around the extremely unwealthy.  Just off the top of my head, I remember Arthur (1981), Annie (1982), Trading Places (1983), Brewster's Millions (1985), Ruthless People (1986), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Big Business (1988), Coming to America (1988), and more. This was a time when it seemed like the characters in film comedies always had maids and butlers.

Somewhere in all this mess was Garry Marshall's fourth feature film, Overboard (1987) starring Goldie Hawn as a spoiled rich woman who loses her memory and Kurt Russell as an earthy carpenter who takes advantage of that situation. Edward Herrmann, Katherine Helmond, and Roddy McDowell come along for the ride. Have you already guessed that this is the film we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast? Well, it is. You can hear what we thought of Overboard by clicking the play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 229: Ed/Woody

Is there a connection between these two very different directors?

Not long ago, on this very blog, I declared that Ed Wood and Woody Allen were opposites. Eddie held onto seemingly every bit of footage he ever developed in the hopes of using it someday, while Woody scrapped and reshot an entire feature film at a cost of millions of dollars just because he felt like it. Obviously, these men had very different approaches to the filmmaking process. Besides, Woody is an Oscar winner who for decades (until his late-in-life downfall and disgrace) was one of America's most-respected and praised directors. And Eddie? Well... you know. MST3K. Golden Turkey Awards. "Worst Director Ever." That stuff.

But maybe these two have more in common than I'd thought. For one thing, they were born in the same state (New York) just eleven years apart. They witnessed decades of the same history and experienced a lot of the same popular culture, too. So they were drawing on the same source material when they became filmmakers and writers. Maybe their views even aligned to some degree. I know, for example, that both men were stubborn haters of rock music and never warmed to it, sort of like how people of my parents' generation remained deeply resentful of rap music even after it had been around for decades. And when you read Allen's short story "Count Dracula," as collected in the book Getting Even (1971), you get the sense that he's inspired by Bela Lugosi's portrayal of the title character.

An early Woody Allen film.

Recently, while doing research for my podcast, These Days Are Ours, I had to revisit one of Woody Allen's early comedies, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972). I hadn't thought much about that movie in years, but it was directly referenced in a Garry Marshall comedy I was reviewing called Nothing in Common (1986) so I had to refresh my memory. Specifically, in Nothing in Common, Tom Hanks quotes a joke from Everything You Always... in the hopes of impressing Sela Ward. It doesn't work. (Or maybe it does, because she sleeps with him just a few scenes later.)

When I started looking into Everything You Always..., one of the first sources I consulted was the movie's Wikipedia entry. And there, I discovered this very intriguing passage in the film's synopsis:

Victor, a sex researcher, and Helen Lacey, a journalist, visit Dr. Bernardo, a researcher who formerly worked with Masters and Johnson but now has his own laboratory complete with a lab assistant named Igor. After they see a series of bizarre sexual experiments underway at the lab and realize that Bernardo is insane, they escape before Helen becomes the subject of another of his experiments. The segment culminates with a scene in which the countryside is terrorized by a giant runaway breast created by the researcher. The first part of this segment is a parody of Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955), and especially, The Unearthly (1957), which also stars John Carradine. 

There it was: a direct reference to Ed Wood himself in an article about a Woody Allen movie! Even when I'm not looking for Eddie, I find him! Obviously, I had to investigate further.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 228: The 'Orgy of the Dead' novelization (1966)

Ed Wood turned his script for Orgy of the Dead into a novel.

"Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made!"

-Mel Brooks, Spaceballs (1987)

   

It used to be that, once a movie left theaters, it was basically gone. Unless it played on television or was screened at a revival house, you just couldn't see it. All that survived were people's faulty memories. VCRs changed that, obviously, but these marvelous machines didn't become common in American homes until the 1980s. Before that, people who wanted to revisit a movie had to rely on soundtrack albums and tie-in books.

Movie soundtracks started gaining popularity in the 1950s, thanks to the invention of the long-playing record in 1948, but novelizations have existed nearly as long as there have been feature films. Such books were even produced for silent films of the 1910s and 1920s! By the 1960s, novelizations were a regular part of a movie's marketing campaign and remained so for decades. The tie-in books and the movies they were based on had a symbiotic relationship; each raised interest in the other. Novelizations were so popular, in fact, that at least two of Ed Wood's novels, Raped in the Grass (1968) and Bye Bye Broadie (1968), falsely claimed to be based on motion pictures. To be clear, neither movie exists. 

Ed Wood's first genuine movie novelization came out in 1966. It was an adaptation of his own screenplay for Steve Apostolof's Orgy of the Dead (1965). This was perhaps the only full-length book to arise from Eddie's brief and largely unsuccessful association with Forrest J. Ackerman, founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. It was Ackerman who sold the book to Earl Kemp, editorial director at a San Diego publisher called Greenleaf Classics. The paperback has since become quite a collector's item, partially thanks to the painted cover art by artist Robert Bonfils (1922-2018). Unfortunately, to further illustrate the book, Ed Wood pilfered some photographs from Steve Apostolof's personal collection of stills. This contributed to the rift between Ed and Steve that persisted until the two reunited in 1972 for a new series of films.

The opening credits of Orgy of the Dead indicate, by the way, that the screenplay is based on Ed Wood's novel. This is not the case. By all accounts, Orgy started as a screenplay by Wood that was then purchased by Steve Apostolof and turned into a film. The novelization was only written after the release of the movie. In other words, the movie birthed the book, not the other way around. Perhaps Steve and Ed had already planned to release a book based on Orgy and they were trying to drum up interest in the novelization before it was published.

Now, if you've seen the movie Orgy of the Dead, you might be wondering how Eddie managed to get an entire novel out of it. After all, the plot is a bit sparse, and that's being charitable. A horror writer named Bob (William Bates) and his grumbling girlfriend Shirley (Pat Barrington) survive a car crash and stagger into an old, abandoned cemetery where they witness a strange trial presided over by a cloaked figure called the Emperor (Criswell) and his assistant, the Princess of Darkness (Fawn Silver). The Emperor and Princess sit in judgment over a procession of the recently deceased and decide what happens to their souls in the afterlife.

Podcast Tuesday: "Diabetic Neuropathy of a Salesman"

Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason square off in Nothing in Common.

Back in the 1980s, movies depended a lot more on star power than they do today. In the 2020s, some franchise or intellectual property is generally the "star" that sells a movie. But the way to market a film successfully forty years ago was to emphasize the big-name actors in it. If there were any major celebrities in a movie, the studio would make damned sure that their famous names and equally-famous faces appeared very prominently on the posters and in the trailers. 

Garry Marshall's comedy-drama Nothing in Common (1986) is a perfect example. The film is about a hotshot Chicago ad executive whose aging parents suddenly split up. What the ad campaign really wants you to know, however, is that the movie stars Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. The one-sheet is literally a closeup of their faces, glaring at each other. Why should you go to the theater? To see these two guys that you already know from other stuff.

Whenever my parents asked my grandmother to accompany us to a new movie, she'd always ask, "Who's in it?" And if we couldn't supply any famous names in the cast, she wouldn't be interested. When Nothing in Common came out, I'm sure it was Jackie Gleason's presence that convinced Grandma to go with us to the theater that day. So we saw Garry Marshall's film as a family. I can't remember if any of us loved or hated it. In fact, there were only a few aspects of the film that stuck in my memory at all, namely Tom Hanks' answering machine message and Jackie Gleason's diabetes-ravaged foot.

Is there anything more to Nothing in Common worth remembering? This week on These Days Are Ours, my cohost and I review the film and give you our unvarnished opinions on it. Please do join us.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 227: "Death Takes a Hell-A-Day" (1966)

Uncle Forry penned an introduction for one of Ed Wood's early novels.

I've made my way through many of Ed Wood's books from the 1960s and '70s, both fiction and nonfiction, and I've found that very few of them have introductions or preambles of any kind. Oh, Eddie will occasionally include a preface in one of his supposedly-factual "sociosex" paperbacks, like Suburbia Confidential (1967), which he wrote under the dubious pen name Dr. Emil Moreau. But generally, Eddie just liked to jump right in with Chapter One. No foreplay.

A definite exception is the 1966 novelization of Orgy of the Dead published by Greenleaf Classics. This book came out fairly early in Ed's writing career—it's actually the second book listed in the bibliography from Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992)—and it comes from the brief time when Ed's literary agent was Famous Monsters of Filmland founder Forrest J. "Uncle Forry" Ackerman. Unfortunately, since Forry was not really interested in drumming up work for Ed and seemed to hold him in outright contempt, their partnership was not terribly productive. While Forry mostly tried to duck Ed Wood by any means necessary, the beloved magazine editor did find time to pen a colorful little intro for the Orgy tie-in book.

While Orgy of the Dead has been republished several times since 1966, the Ackerman intro has kind of vanished into the ether in the ensuing decades. I've read this novel several times (and may review it here someday), but even I had never seen the book's original preface. I mentioned this on an Ed Wood Facebook forum recently, and my pleas were heard by the great W. Paul Apel, author of I Watched Football Early the Day I Died (2023). Paul was kind enough to send me the introduction, and I now pass that introduction on to you. I thought we could go over it together.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 226: Will Sloan's Ed Wood: Made In Hollywood USA (2025)

Author Will Sloan gives us his take on the man from Poughkeepsie.

When I was younger, one of my favorite things to do on a slow Sunday afternoon was go to the mall bookstore and browse through the BFI Film Classics series. Have you seen these? If you've ever been to a Barnes & Noble (or somewhere similar), you probably have. They're little pocket-sized guidebooks, each one about a different movie and each written by a different author. They're basically photo-illustrated essays about classic films. One of them, for instance, is Salman Rushdie's take on The Wizard of Oz (1939). Another is Camille Paglia's interpretation of The Birds (1963). There are dozens more, and the BFI is still making them.

A BFI book.

To my knowledge, however, there are no BFI books about Glen or Glenda (1953), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), or even Ed Wood (1994). What a rotten bit of luck. Those three films are the likeliest candidates for the series, and they've been shut out so far. (Hell, I keep hoping that Glenda will wind up in the Criterion Collection someday. Fingers crossed.)

Until such time as the British Film Institute gets its act together, we can enjoy Will Sloan's Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (2025). Sloan is an author of no small reputation. You may know him from his podcasts, Michael and Us and The Important Cinema Club. My introduction to him was the recent two-disc Gold Ninja Video edition of Ed Wood's Revenge of the Dead  (1959), which he cohosts with Justin Decloux. He's contributed material to The New Yorker and NPR and has already authored a few pop culture books, including The Journey of Stoogeological Studies (2023). This guy covers the waterfront, so to speak. And now, he has finally produced an entire volume about the career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. that feels similar in spirit to those BFI books.

So is Made in Hollywood USA a biography of Wood, like Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), or is it a sweeping critical reappraisal of his work, like Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009)? I'd say it's both, but it leans heavily in the direction of the latter. In Wood's case, it is impossible and inadvisable to separate the art from the artist. What makes Wood's films and books so interesting, in fact, is how Eddie's own views and experiences inform his work. When you watch Plan 9 or Glenda, you cannot help but wonder what kind of person would have conceived of such a thing. These strange, misshapen movies did not grow on trees; they came from somewhere. But where?

Podcast Tuesday: "The Devil's Cabana Boy"

Janet Jones, Matt Dillon, and Jessica Walter in The Flamingo Kid.

One of the common complaints about Happy Days in its later seasons is that the long-running sitcom gradually gave up on the nostalgia angle that had been so important to its initial success. Oh, sure, you'd still hear the occasional oldie on the soundtrack, and Fonzie (Henry Winkler) never stopped wearing that iconic leather jacket. But Happy Days didn't put much effort into this aspect of the show in its final years. It became just another generic sitcom that might as well have been set in the 1980s.

Had Happy Days creator Garry Marshall lost interest in recapturing the past? Not hardly! His second directorial effort, a coming-of-age film called The Flamingo Kid (1984), was awash in the cars, clothes, hairdos, and slang of the early 1960s. What's more, the film was set in Brooklyn, where Garry himself grew up. The film definitely evokes a time and a place, much more so than late-period Happy Days did. But does this mean The Flamingo Kid is a great film? Is it "better" than Happy Days? The only way you'll know is to listen to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 225: More about Mondo Oscenità (1966)

Betty Boatner relaxes in a scene from Mondo Oscenita.

Forgive me for making a second trip to the buffet so soon, but I'm not quite done with Mondo Oscenità (1966) aka World of Obscenity, the forgotten shockumentary with never-before-seen footage from Ed Wood's unfinished juvie epic Hellborn (1956). Reader Brendon Sibley made me aware of this odd little film, which was rereleased by Something Weird Video in 1997. Oscenità was directed by Joseph P. Mawra, an exploitation filmmaker best remembered for the infamous Olga series of grungy, B&W bondage movies originally released in 1964 and 1965. Oscenità contains copious footage from the Olga films, and Brendon informs me that one of those films, Mme. Olga's Massage Parlor (1965), is now considered lost. The fleeting clips we see in this documentary might be all that remains of it.

A typical Olga film.

At the time of its release, Oscenità was an obvious attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Italian film Mondo Cane (1963). Mawra even gave himself a bogus Italian name (Carlo Scappine) for this one. From what I can tell, there are no original scenes in this entire movie; it is all repurposed footage, much of it violent and/or sexual in nature. Mawra simply used whatever material he had available to him to pad the running time, perhaps hoping that the narration by Joel Holt (aka Lou Hopkins) would tie it all together into something coherent.

Beyond the Hellborn footage, which came to Mawra via producer George Weiss, Mondo Oscenità has further scenes of interest to fans of Ed Wood and cult cinema in general. About 45 minutes into the film, for instance, we see a young blonde woman in a flimsy negligee, lounging on a white vinyl couch and smoking a cigarette. After a few seconds, a middle-aged man enters, clutching a half pint of bourbon and two glasses. He sets these items on a nearby coffee table, then snuffs out the girl's cigarette and his own in an ashtray. Now unencumbered, the two lovers make out for a few seconds before the scene fades to black. On the soundtrack through all this, the narrator drones on about how movies have glamourized crime and extramarital sex:

The human desire for realism in motion pictures has created this unfortunate situation. When the code of censorship was in effect, certain responsibilities were set aside for the film producers whereby there would be definite and explicit rules applying to the treatment of sex upon the screen. Promiscuity and adultery or casual disregard for the marriage vows should not be condoned or presented in a way seeming to be desirable. Further rules specified that scenes of passion should not be introduced unless essential to the plot and that these scenes should not include lustful embraces or open-mouthed kissing, nor should there be any suggestive postures or gestures. The spectacle upon the screen of intense passion resulting from love should not corrupt the emotions of the audience. If, however, the passion is presented in such a way as to suggest lust alone, this does tend to stimulate the same emotions in the audience.

What makes this sequence noteworthy is that the blonde on the couch is Betty Boatner, who played the doomed Shirley in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge (1960), while her male paramour is Western baddie Kenne Duncan, who played the starring role of Lt. Matt Carson in that same film. In addition to being a drinking buddy of Ed Wood, Duncan was a mainstay in Wood's repertory company in the '50s and '60s. Their projects together include Night of the Ghouls (1959) and Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960). Duncan also worked on such Wood-adjacent films as Pete Perry's Revenge of the Virgins (1959) and Ronny Ashcroft's The Astounding She-Monster (1958).