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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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 ofI 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.
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?
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.
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).
Ed Wood's footage wound up in the strangest places, but few were stranger than this.
In 1962, Italy dropped the bomb. Its name was Mondo Cane aka A Dog's Life, and it had the effect of a nuclear blast on the world of exploitation cinema.
The first "mondo" film.
This modestly-budgeted travelogue, which purported to depict strange practices and rituals from around the world, became a huge hit with Western audiences thanks mostly to its heady mix of sex and violence. Even the film's catchy theme song, "More," became a pop and jazz standard. ("More than the greatest love the world has known...") Did it matter that numerous sequences in Mondo Cane were staged or manipulated by the film's three directors? Apparently, not much. Thrill-hungry audiences of the '60s flocked to see such scenes as a human woman breastfeeding a piglet. Wouldn't you? Remember, the internet wouldn't be invented for decades.
It's not often that you can say a single film inspired an entire subgenre of cult cinema, but that's exactly what happened in this case. Naturally, the makers of Mondo Cane produced a series of official sequels, ultimately leading to their beyond-insane Addio Zio Tom (1971), but schlockmeisters everywhere were eager to copy the profitable Cane formula and make lurid shockumentaries of their own. Many of these films had the word "mondo" right in the title so that audiences would know exactly what they were getting for their money. We were given Mondo Freudo (1966), Mondo Balordo (1964), Mondo Hollywood (1967), and even Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless (1966).
One of the lesser-known examples of the phenomenon is a film called Mondo Oscenità (1966) aka World of Obscenity. Right off the bat, the film's Italian title is bogus, since it's an American production. This demonstrates the across-the-board popularity of Mondo Cane: for a brief period in movie history, American filmmakers were pretending to be Italian! Director Joseph P. Mawra—best known for his work on the kinky, bondage-heavy Olga movies, such as Olga's House of Shame (1964) and Mme. Olga's Massage Parlor (1965)—actually called himself "Carlo Scappine" for this one. A likely-nonexistent producer called "Gino Poluzzo" (with no other credits) is also listed in the main title sequence.
Mondo Oscenità pretends to be a documentary about the history of obscenity in motion pictures. I say "pretends to be" because Joseph P. Mawra is clearly using this film as an excuse to show as much salacious (for the time) material as he can possibly assemble. And to get this thing to feature length, he just throws in whatever scraps of celluloid he had lying around the editing room, including some silent comedy footage that has nothing to do with anything. Fortunately, deep-voiced narrator Joel Holt (billed as "Lou Hopkins") is there to tie it all together with ponderous pronouncements like this:
In the next 75 minutes, we will take you into the world of motion pictures, into a world unfamiliar to most. A world made up of thought, sight, and imagination. A special kind of medium that can transport you into the future and take you back to the past. It is a state of unrealities, where sight, sound, feelings are all too real, where stimulations are aroused, where feelings are raised and lowered according to the thoughts of the director. We will show you what was considered too strong for the public in the early days of the motion picture and what is being viewed today. We will show you scenes from motion pictures that were judged as obscene only a short time ago, scenes that led to the outcry that obscenity in motion pictures was taking over the industry, that this is becoming a world of obscenity.
I'm guessing Mawra was more than a little influenced by Rod Serling. This is essentially The Twilight Zone: After Dark. The above monologue is even accompanied by footage of the stars in space.
What makes Mondo Oscenità of interest to us today is that it includes some otherwise-unused footage from Ed Wood's abandoned film Hellborn (1956). While he was an avid follower of trends in the entertainment industry, Eddie never even attempted to make a "mondo" movie of his own. Some of his nonfiction books and articles, like Drag Trade (1967) and Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History (1967), are written in the same basic spirit as those films, however. In fact, every time Wood writes about the odd sexual practices of Japan, as he does in Drag Trade and several of his magazine articles, he's channeling the spirit of Mondo Cane.
It was reader Brendon Sibley who hipped me to Mondo Oscenità , and I'm grateful he did because this is quite a find. I'd recently compared two different versions of the Hellborn footage, one from a 1993 documentary and one from a 2017 Blu-ray, and found that they contained the exact same footage, only projected at different speeds. In brief, the film alternates between two different groups of juvenile delinquents, one male and the other female, as they commit various crimes and get into fights. In the end, the boys and girls come together for a sort of picnic at Griffith Park. The footage ends with a black-clad hoodlum, played by Conrad Brooks, wandering off into the woods with his date, a curly-haired brunette in an angora sweater. This was the Hellborn I knew, and I thought it was all there was to know. I was dead wrong.
This moment is the culmination of a longtime dream for Garry Marshall.
By the summer of 1982, it looked like Garry Marshall's long and prosperous career in television was slowly winding down. Mork & Mindy had just wrapped, while Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days were obviously in their waning years. Garry had been a writer, producer, and occasional director in that medium for decades, but he was understandably anxious to move on to the next phase of his career: directing feature films.
Fortunately, he got his chance with a wacky ensemble comedy called Young Doctors in Love. Set at the fictional "City Hospital" and partially filmed at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the film follows the misadventures of some rambunctious young interns over the course of a single, eventful year. The cast Marshall assembled for this movie is astonishing: Michael McKean, Sean Young, Pamela Reed, Taylor Negron, Harry Dean Stanton, Dabney Coleman, Patrick Macnee, a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards, and many more. This was also the film that established the working relationship between director Marshall and actor Hector Elizondo. And it was all underwritten by ABC Motion Pictures, the filmmaking branch of the TV network that Garry Marshall had served so faithfully in the '70s.
In Drown the Devil, Angel Scott finds the connection between Ed Wood and religion.
Neighbors, said the reverend, he couldnt stay out of these here hell, hell, hellholes right here in Nacogdoches. I said to him, said: You goin to take the son of God in there with ye? And he said: Oh no. No I aint. And I said: Dont you know that he said I will foller ye always even unto the end of the road?
Well, he said, I aint askin nobody to go nowheres. And I said: Neighbor, you dont need to ask. He’s a goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye dont. I said: Neighbor, you caint get shed of him. Now. Are you going to drag him, him, into that hellhole yonder?
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
The field of Woodology has now progressed to the point that we are getting books about fairly specific aspects of Ed Wood's life: his military career, his marriage to Kathy Wood, his unproduced screenplays, etc. Of all these, few projects have intrigued me more than Angel Scott's Drown the Devil: A Spiritual Biography of Ed Wood (Bear Manor, 2024). A real-life pastor, Angel has been a vital part of the Ed Wood online fan community for years now, and I knew she was working on a religious-themed book about Wood and his films. Naturally, I was curious to see what she uncovered in her extensive research.
My guess was that this would be another book that used popular culture as a springboard to talk about matters of theology and philosophy. I was thinking specifically of The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff, The Gospel According to Peanuts (1965) by Robert L. Short, and the popular anthology The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001). So has Angel Scott written The Tao of Wood or The Gospel According to St. Eddie? Not exactly. While there is some discussion of the religious content in Wood's films, particularly Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), this is not primarily an interpretive or analytical book. For readers seeking something like that, I'd recommend Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009) by Rob Craig.
Instead, this book is exactly what its subtitle proclaims it to be: a spiritual biography. In Drown the Devil, Angel Scott tells the story of Ed Wood's life and career, from his birth in Poughkeepsie, NY in 1924 to his death in Hollywood in 1978. We hit all the expected stops on the tour. Eddie works as a movie usher in his hometown, serves a stint in the Marines during World War II, comes home after the war, heads out to California, makes some infamous horror and sci-fi movies for a few years, and finally descends into pornography before dying penniless at 54. Along the way, he develops a serious, crippling addiction to alcohol and has at least three significant romantic relationships, two of which lead to marriage.
Drown the Devil examines the role that religion played in these events. To put it another way, where is God in the strange, sad story of Edward D. Wood, Jr.? To be honest, it's not a question I'd spent a great deal of time pondering before now. When I think of directors whose films frequently grapple with spiritual matters, my mind goes to Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman. While Ed Wood's movies are not entirely godless—indeed, Bela Lugosi's character in Glen or Glenda might be a stand-in for the Almighty—I wouldn't exactly say religion was one of the director's main motifs. Ultimately, each one of us has to deal with God in some way, whether it's to follow Him, scorn Him, or deny His very existence. So it does make sense to examine Ed's life and work from a religious standpoint.
As I mentioned earlier, Angel Scott did an admirable amount of research for this book, and some of her most interesting findings occur in the early chapters that deal with Eddie's youth in Poughkeepsie. I really had no idea of his Methodist upbringing or the fact that he served as chaplain for the Poughkeepsie chapter of the Marine Corps League for a year after his military service ended. So Ed Wood was much more grounded in religion than I had previously assumed. I was also very intrigued by an extended comparison of Glen or Glenda to Rowland V. Lee's I Am Suzanne (1933), a now-obscure romantic melodrama about the relationship between a dancer (Lilian Harvey) and a struggling puppeteer (Gene Raymond).
The heart of Drown the Devil, accounting for about a third of the book's total length, is a very detailed telling of the making and distribution of Ed Wood's most famous film, Grave Robbers from Outer Space aka Plan 9 from Outer Space. As Ed's fans know, Plan 9 was partially financed by the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills, and the relationship between the director and the church was not always harmonious. The unlikely story (a Baptist church making a cheap horror film?) has already been told in numerous books and articles and was played largely for laughs in the Tim Burton-directed biopic Ed Wood (1994). One particularly memorable scene has Eddie and several members of his oddball entourage being baptized in a swimming pool. In the published version of the Ed Wood screenplay, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski talk about how they handled this aspect of the plot:
We had to turn Plan 9 from Outer Space into a climax. After much thought, the solution hit us, simple and elegant. The bad guys would become the Baptist moneymen, who want nothing more than a coherent film. All they are asking for is what any rational person would: continuity and logic. It is irony on top of irony. In the world of Ed, this impudence makes them villains. How dare they compromise him!
So it seems that the biopic was more interested in telling an entertaining, sympathetic story than in being strictly truthful to history. Fair enough. I don't fault the screenwriters for that.
For this book, Angel Scott has combed through the archives, including some decades-old church newsletters, to discover the truth of the Plan 9/First Baptist saga. It turns out that the story is more nuanced and complicated than I had previously suspected. Yes, Eddie got into contact with the Baptist church through his then-landlord, J. Edward Reynolds, who was a member of the congregation. And, yes, Ed joined the congregation himself in order to curry favor with the church's leadership. But Scott's book reveals that Ed Wood was not the opportunistic carpetbagger you might assume him to be. He attended services at First Baptist for two years and even penned a pageant for the organization, though no scripts have survived. Meanwhile, the infamous baptism of Wood's coterie had a surprisingly long-lasting effect on some of them. And J. Edward Reynolds, essentially a comic character in Ed Wood, emerges from Drown the Devil as a tragic figure with some of the same demons that ultimately claimed Eddie himself.
After directing The Sinister Urge (1960), his last ostensibly "normal" film, Ed Wood spent most of the rest of his life working prodigiously in the adult entertainment industry. He penned dozens of pornographic novels and wrote many short stories and articles for nudie magazines. He also worked on both hardcore and softcore films as a writer, director, and occasional actor. Ed's "porno" work constitutes a major part of his canon, perhaps even the majority of it. So what do we do with all this as we try to make sense of Eddie's life? Some books and documentaries about Wood either marginalize or ignore this material, while others revel in it. Scott takes a moderate stance, giving Ed's adult work ample space in the manuscript without wallowing in the truly unpleasant details. She acknowledges the reality of Eddie's career prospects in the 1960s and '70s while leaving him with at least a modicum of dignity.
As I made my way through Drown the Devil, naturally I reflected on my own complicated history with religion. I was raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family and attended weekly masses until I was in my late twenties. My faith was greatly shaken by my mother's death when I was in high school, but I continued to go through the motions of being a Catholic for roughly another decade after she passed away. As of 2012, I was calling myself an atheist, even though I never actually stopped praying. Today, I honestly don't know where I stand. There are days when God seems impossible to deny and others when He seems impossible to believe. I can't say that Ed Wood's movies have shed a great deal of light on the matter for me, but Angel Scott has certainly given me some new questions to ponder as I screen Plan 9 for the umpteenth time.
Drown the Devil may be purchased from Amazon here or directly from the publisher here.
Ed Wood (top row, center) stars in Glen or Glenda, as released by Admit One Video Presentations.
Last week, we got to know Admit One Video Presentations, the offbeat Toronto-based company that distributed Ed Wood's movies in Canada in the 1980s. Like numerous other companies from that era, Admit One acquired vintage low-budget sci-fi and horror films and released them profitably for home viewing, much to the delight of the emerging "bad movie" cult. You might think of them as Canada's answer to Rhino Home Video or Something Weird Video. To my knowledge, Admit One put out their own versions of all six of Ed Wood's directorial efforts from Glen or Glenda (1953) to The Sinister Urge (1960). If eBay listings are to be believed, these releases are now pricey collector's items.
I was unaware of Admit One until recently, when reader Brandon Sibley brought the company and its products to my attention. To me, the most intriguing of the company's tapes is their release of Glen or Glenda because it gives us yet another slightly different cut of the film. In the past, I've explained how Glenda was released under numerous titles and was edited to various lengths, often to appease the censors. To summarize, the main edits I'm familiar with are:
The Rhino cut. The longest, least-censored edit I've seen, if not necessarily the best looking or sounding. It was released on VHS tape by Rhino Home Video and was included on the two-disc set Ed Wood: A Salute to Incompetence (2007) from Passport International Entertainment. The film's title card is obviously, clumsily doctored. Whatever real title appeared onscreen has been blurred out, and the title "GLEN OR GLENDA" has been pasted over it. I believe this change was made by distributor Wade Williams, who did something similar to Night of the Ghouls (1959) aka Revenge of the Dead.
The Image Entertainment cut. The most common version I've seen on the market. This is a sharper, cleaner transfer of the film with less static on the audio track, but it's plagued by numerous omissions, including a scene in which a homosexual man (Bruce Spencer) hits on an unfriendly straight man (Conrad Brooks). The dialogue also deletes certain references to God and sex. Some shots, including part of Glen's nightmare, have been trimmed for pacing reasons. Image's cut is the one used for the colorized version of Glen orGlenda and was also the one Rob Craig consulted for Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009). It, too, has the doctored title card.
The AGFA cut. The most recent edition of the film and the one that has provoked the most angry reactions from Ed Wood fans. This transfer from the American Genre Film Archive features dramatically brighter, crisper images than we've ever seen before, but it is also easily the shortest, most censored cut of the movie on the market. It's missing many sequences, some of which are iconic and crucial (e.g. the buffalo stampede) and also reorders certain scenes, especially during Glen's nightmare. The film features a unique credit sequence, including a title card that incorrectly identifies the movie as Twisted Lives.
The Dialtones sing one of their many, many songs in Happy Days: A New Musical.
I watch a fair amount of product review videos on YouTube, and recently, a channel I follow called Freakin' 2 tested out some novelty Easter candies. Among the items being reviewed were those Dr. Pepper-flavored Peeps you may have seen at the supermarket. I was especially interested in these because I'd tried them myself a few weeks ago and found them to be a decent facsimile of the popular beverage. But I don't really drink a whole lot of Dr. Pepper, so maybe I'm not the best judge.
The host of the Freakin' 2 video reached this conclusion: "I think occasional fans of Dr. Pepper will probably like it, but purists may not be convinced."
Well, friends, that's exactly my reaction to Happy Days: A New Musical, the show we're reviewing this week on These Days Are Ours. If you've seen a handful of Happy Days episodes and have a basic grasp of the characters and their relationships, the 2007 stage musical will probably be satisfactory to you. It's pleasant enough and doesn't overstay its welcome. But if Happy Days is burned into your brain because you've reviewed all 255 episodes, plus the animated series, the stage version may seem slightly "off" to you.
In other words, Happy Days: A New Musical is the Dr. Pepper Peeps of musicals. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Listen to our review of Act 2 and find out!
This quirky company brought Ed Wood's movies to the Great White North.
The home video gold rushof the 1980s and '90s was a boon to director Ed Wood, even though he was already dead by then. By pure serendipity, the book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) made Eddie and his films famous at the same time people were starting to buy VCRs for their homes. Naturally, those folks needed plenty of prerecorded videotapes to play on those expensive new machines of theirs, and numerous distribution companies popped up to supply those tapes. Ed Wood's movies certainly were not left out in the cold. His best known works, including Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), were released on tape numerous times by numerous labels.
In the 1980s, a Canadian company called Admit One Video Presentations produced its own line of Ed Wood tapes, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the Golden Turkey publicity. Very little evidence of Admit One survives today, apart from some Ebay listings for their products, but they released editions of numerous sci-fi and horror films: Robot Monster (1953), Reefer Madness (1936), Spider Baby (1967), The Horror of Party Beach (1964), Chained for Life (1952), Satan's Satellites (1958), She Demons (1958), Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Monster from Green Hell (1957), The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958), White Zombie (1952), Lost Planet Airmen (1951), and Bowery at Midnight (1942), which came paired with Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946).
What concerns us, however, are Admit One's releases of Ed Wood's movies. It was reader Brendon Sibley who brought the company to my attention. As far as I can tell, Admit One put out its own editions of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and Glen or Glenda plus Jail Bait (1954), Night of the Ghouls aka Revenge of the Dead (1959), and The Sinister Urge (1960). In case you're counting, that's all six of the feature films Ed directed during his classic period. You must admit that's a very decent Ed Wood catalog, especially considering the Tim Burton biopic was a decade away and Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) hadn't even been published.
This article captures Ed Wood in his "Cliff Clavin" mode.
Ed Wood died less than four years before the TV sitcom Cheers debuted on NBC in September 1982. Isn't that wild? They seem like they belong to two very different eras of popular culture, but they were closer than you'd guess. In fact, I think Eddie would have been a great character on the show, had it taken place in L.A. instead of Boston. From his writing, I gather that Ed was contemptuous of "beer bars" and "beer joints," but the man clearly loved to drink and to socialize, and a bar like the one in Cheers would have allowed him to do both. (Fun fact: Eddie's last apartment was only two miles from the Paramount soundstage where Cheers was filmed.)
In the 1960s, director Joe Robertson owned a bar in North Hollywood called the Surf Girl, and Ed Wood was a regular there, sometimes even showing up in drag. I bet everyone there knew his name. I can imagine a bedraggled Eddie coming into the bar after a hard day—his wig crooked, his makeup smeared—and everyone yelling, "ED!!!!"
In the past, I've compared Ed Wood to Cliff Clavin, the motormouthed, know-it-all mailman John Ratzenberger played so ably on Cheers. I think Eddie considered himself something of an expert on numerous topics, and he was not one to keep his opinions to himself. This side of his personality comes through in his writing occasionally. I've also referred to this as Eddie's "professorial mode" in which he aims to dazzle us with his knowledge. And this week, we encounter another sterling example of this phenomenon.
