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.