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

Want a whole lotta Criswell in one book? 

Criswell was the Liberace of futurists. 

Liberace: The Criswell of music?

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

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

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

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

It's difficult to review a book like Accurate Glimpse because it's essentially 150 pages of Criswell spouting his trademark predictions, many of them outlandish and impossible. (Cris was weirdly obsessed with topics like cannibalism, leprosy, and undersea volcanoes.) There's no real continuity to it, just a lot of sentences starting with "I predict..." You might as well review fortune cookie messages or Bazooka Joe comics. Criswell was like a coin-operated machine in an arcade. If you gave him money, he'd give you a prediction. It was a trick he performed over and over for decades. I'll just turn to a random page and see what I find. Okay, here's something from page 67:

I predict a new type of laser ray which can dissolve the sex functioning organs forever and a day! This dissolves the tissue and no power remains! It is painless and the patient is not told of the simple manipulation!

That's pretty typical Criswell stuff. This whole book is like that. Cris tackles many subjects in his writings, everything from politics to technology to show business, but his tone rarely changes. He's always that manic street preacher you see in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Whether he was like this in his personal life, I don't know.

Criswell: an inaccurate man.

The standard take on Criswell is that, despite his laughable claims of 80% (or whatever) accuracy, his predictions were nearly always wrong, sometimes wildly so. Since we live in the 21st century, we know a lot of things that Cris didn't know or couldn't have known. After all, we're currently experiencing the very future that Cris failed to predict. We know that aliens never landed on the lawn of the White House, for instance, and that the world did not end in 1999. The wall-sized, three-dimensional TV set has not yet come to market, nor has the one-shot serum that cures all diseases. It's possible, then, to read Accurate Glimpse purely as an absurdist comedy written by a man who was either a fraud, a lunatic, or some combination of both. If that's what you want, the book has plenty of it.

But that standard take no longer interests me, just as I'm no longer interested in thinking of Ed Wood as the bumbling "worst director ever" who dressed in drag on the job and who used hubcaps (or pie plates, depending on who's telling the story) as makeshift flying saucers. I've been writing about these guys for over a decade now, and to keep this interesting for myself, there has to be more to them than that. I suppose, when I'm making my way through a book like Accurate Glimpse, I'm trying to figure out what Criswell actually believed. Was it all hokum or did he mean any of it?

What strikes me as a motif in Accurate Glimpse is Criswell's utter hatred of communists and anyone even a centimeter to the left of Senator Joe McCarthy. Eddie and Cris lived unorthodox lives, to say the least, but they were staunchly conservative in their politics. For Cris, as we see repeatedly in Accurate Glimpse, this means condemning rock music, marijuana, and men with facial hair. He doesn't seem to share Eddie's undying hatred of Levi's jeans, though.

So would Mr. Criswell be a MAGA Republican if he were alive in 2025? Possibly. There are some bitter anti-immigrant sentiments in Accurate Glimpse, along with the aforementioned McCarthy-esque rants. But, at the same time, Criswell was obviously concerned about the irreparable damage we humans are doing to the earth. The term "climate change" was not widely known during Criswell's time, but the concept would have been instantly believable to him. So that's at least one major break with right-wing orthodoxy. Also, in his books and columns, Cris promoted his own brand of what I'd call extreme feminism. Possibly to flatter his female audience, he frequently predicted that women would rise up and seize the reins of government around the world, leaving men in a subservient position. I don't think that aligns with the current priorities of the GOP.

Harpist Lloyd Lindroth.

But if you're a regular reader of this series, you probably want to know if there's any Ed Wood-specific content to be found in An Accurate Glimpse of the Future. Oh, sure. I mean, considering Criswell was a charter member of the Wood coterie, the entire book is Wood-adjacent. But there are more specific references to Eddie, too, such as:

• (page 69) "Lloyd Lindroth, the Harpist Bazaar, will score the new film I Woke Up Early for Columbia, the new Edward D. Wood film."

• (pages 69-70) "I predict that Edward D. Wood Jr. will start a new trend of 'Classic Terror' films out of Hollywood utilizing the best combined movie and TV tecnics [sic] plus a new type of horror makeup! You will be able to buy frightening images of James Moore, Valda Hansen, Paul Marco, Harvey Dunn, Mona McKinnon, and Jennie Stevens dressed as they were in the films! This new merchandising method will revolutionize  the Hollywood scene overnight! The next authentic ghost story out of Hollywood will be the Paul Marco production of Some Body Walked Over My Grave!"

• (page 70) "I predict that Tapestry in Terror starring Vampira and myself will soon be seen as an hour TV program in September of 1971, so watch for it. This is based on The Night People by Edward D. Wood. The soundtrack will also be available on an LP album!" 

A lot to ponder here. Lloyd Lindroth (1931-1994) was a flashy, harp-playing Las Vegas entertainer whose act drew comparisons to Liberace. (Yes, this is another Liberace connection!) While he did make musical contributions to TV shows like Roots, The Lawrence Welk Show, and Peter Gunn, Lindroth never collaborated with Ed Wood on any projects that I know of. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was not produced during Eddie's lifetime and only came to fruition in 1997, sans harp music on the soundtrack.

In discussing Ed Wood's upcoming "classic terror" films, Cris manages to name-drop most of the major cast members in Night of the Ghouls (1959). He strangely omits two of the film's bigger stars, Tor Johnson and Kenne Duncan, and refers to Wood regular Duke Moore by his rarely-used given name, James. Apparently, at some point, Criswell and Paul Marco planned to make an entire movie out of Some Body Walked Over My Grave. All that emerged from this was a long-delayed 45 RPM record that came out in 1995.

As for Tapestry in Terror, this seems to be a reference to Ed Wood's unsold TV pilot, Portraits of Terror (1957). The Night People is likely an alternate title for Final Curtain. But what could Criswell mean when he said that he and Vampira would star in it? Was there a plan to remake it with Cris in the Duke Moore part and Vampira in the Jean Stevens role? Boy, Eddie really did not want to give up on this particular story!

Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future is available in hardcover or paperback right here.