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. Oscenitàwas 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. Oscenitàcontains 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 Oscenitàhas 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.
