Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 281: Johnny Legend remembers Tor Johnson (1982)

In 1982, Fangoria ran a heartfelt tribute to the departed Swedish wrestler.

Now that we have books about Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Criswell, Tor Johnson (1903-1971) is arguably the most famous person in Ed Wood's acting stable not to have a biography on the market. Perhaps someday that will change. The Swedish-born wrestler, born Karl Erik Tore Johansson in Stockholm at the beginning of the previous century, is best-known to cult movie fans for his roles in three of Ed's most-seen movies: Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). But this was neither the beginning nor quite the end of the Swede's lengthy career.

Bob Hope (left) with Tor.

For the sake of the story, Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) pretends that Eddie himself discovered Tor at a wrestling match in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and cast the large, baldheaded man in his first-ever movie role. But, in truth, Johnson started getting film work in the 1930s shortly after he moved to America. His movie and (eventually) television career continued to the 1960s. We may associate Tor with low-budget sci-fi and horror movies—and he did several of those—but his filmography is surprisingly diverse, ranging from comedies to crime thrillers. He worked alongside such legends as Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Tony Curtis, Eddie Cantor, William Powell, Abbott & Costello and more!

With his shaved head, imposing physique, and heavy Swedish accent, Tor was an unmistakable presence onscreen. But his outsized, boisterous personality made him just as memorable offscreen. Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) includes numerous, colorful anecdotes about the wrestler-turned-actor—the massive meals he ate, the toilet seats he broke, etc. He seems like a jovial, fun-loving guy. But there are some potentially upsetting details about Tor in the book as well, including a quote from actor Tony Cardoza who says that the wrestler hired the services of an underaged prostitute while touring India. In some interviews that Grey left on the cutting room floor, Plan 9 actress Mona McKinnon remembers Tor becoming intoxicated at a party and carrying her away against her will.

So who was this man? Until someone pens Super Swedish Angel: The Tor Johnson Story, what we have are various newspaper and magazine articles about Tor that have appeared over the years. A very intriguing example is "I Remember Tor," originally published in issue #22 of Fangoria from October 1982. In it, the late wrestling manager, musician, and film producer Johnny Legend (1948-2026) shares his memories of Tor, who had been deceased for over a decade but whose films were just then coming back into vogue thanks to The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 173: The weird, wild works of Spenser & West (updated in 2026!)

Ed Wood wrote several books (for different publishers!) under the name "Spenser & West" in the late 1960s.

NOTE: I promised last week that I would complete my review of The Oralists (1969) today, but I unexpectedly received bonus information about some other, related Ed Wood books and decided that they deserved an article of their own. The second half of my Oralists review will appear on this blog next week instead. - J.B.

Last Wednesday, I published the first half of my review of The Oralists (1969), Ed Wood's truly depraved guide to oral sex and those who love it. Eddie wrote this book—and possibly a few others—under the pen name Spenser & West. Jean Spenser and Roger West are supposedly a married couple of sex researchers who write books together. It's all bunk, of course, but it theoretically makes the books seem somewhat more credible. (This isn't just smut. It's science.)

I'd always assumed these fictional sexologists, Jean and Roger, were inspired by William H. Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia E. Johnson (1925-2013), two famous real-life sex researchers who actually were married to each other for over 20 years. While M&J's pioneering book Human Sexual Response (1966) was already out on the market and very well-known to the public, including Ed Wood, William and Virginia didn't actually tie the knot until 1971. They divorced in 1993.

In The Oralists, Eddie refers to a previous Spenser & West book called Sexual Fantasia. I was initially unable to find any information about this book whatsoever and assumed Ed Wood just made it up to bolster the fictional resume of Spenser & West, but reader James Pontolillo corrected me on this issue. Like The Oralists, Sexual Fantasia was published by Tiger in 1969. James kindly provided pictures of the front and back covers.

The front and back covers of Sexual Fantasia.

According to James, Sexual Fantasia is quite rare. In fact, his copy might be one of the few left in the world. Naturally, since this book is a companion volume to The Oralists, I wanted to know if Ed Wood had also written it. Here's how James answered:

I've read through it once very breezily and I will say a provisional "Yes". But I really need to take it back out and go through it much more carefully before rendering a final verdict. It definitely has that "Late Wood" porn novel characteristic mixture of corny writing ("my forest is on fire, baby.... get that big hose out and go to work already") with disturbing content (example: very young-age pedophilia). I need to come up with a reasonable solution to scan the rare paperbacks I have in order to get them circulating to interested parties. Perhaps I'll drop some serious $$$ on this in a few years when I retire and will have the time to scan books.

That certainly sounds promising! 

James also helpfully sent me a copy of the table of contents page from Sexual Fantasia as well as the front cover of yet another Spenser & West book, The Prostitutes (1968). The page from Sexual Fantasia is especially interesting because it contains summaries of the book's seven chapters. It's obvious from the summary of Chapter Two that Sexual Fantasia revisits some of the same disturbing themes from The Oralists. The book doesn't appear to be limited to the topic of oral sex, however.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast vs. 'The Curse of Ed Wood' (2003)

The council of elders has reconvened to cover a most unusual movie from 2003.

Making a movie is hard, you guys. I mean, just so ridiculously goddamned hard. Merely getting the actors to show up when and where you told them is a chore in and of itself. And then you actually have to film them saying and doing stuff. It's a nightmare. Something can (and probably will) go wrong at any point in the moviemaking process—from preproduction to production to postproduction. Even after all that turmoil and strife, the fate of your film is in the hands of skeptical viewers, jeering critics, and a vast network of middlemen and sleazeballs.

No one knew these struggles better than writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). From the late 1940s to the late 1970s, he struggled to get his ideas and his stories onto the big screen. Along the way, he faced any number of obstacles: a scarcity of money and resources, hostile and humiliating reviews, shaky or nonexistent distribution, his own out-of-control alcoholism, and (according to some) a total lack of aptitude. But despite all this, he managed to make some movies that have resonated with viewers for generations, including the immortal Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). It's no wonder he's become a hero to low-budget, independent filmmakers everywhere.

Sometimes, those indie filmmakers pay tribute to Ed Wood through their own weird little movies. And that's how we get films like Tim Swartz's surreal softcore effort Barely Lethal Lebanese Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood (2003). (I'm disguising the title somewhat in an effort to flummox the censors.) I was recently made aware of this totally-forgotten film thanks to an unexpected Google Alert. After watching five minutes of it, I decided I needed to get some other Woodologists involved. 

In short, it was time for a new episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. The redoubtable James Pontolillo did some in-depth research into the history of this misbegotten film, including contacting its director. W. Paul Apel and Rob Huffman brought their own insights and ideas to the table. And I was there to add some moments of levity. Naturally, none of this would have been possible without the late, great Greg Javer, who created the podcast in the first place. You can watch the latest episode right here:

Podcast Tuesday: "The Most (To Say the Least)"

Donny Most just wants you to listen to some songs, okay?

"Strike while the iron is hot." 

That's the saying, right? You've gotta take advantage of opportunities, especially financial ones, when they come along. If you wait too long, they could disappear. As a wise man named Jerry Reed once said (or half-sang), "When you're hot, you're hot. And when you're not, you're not." But what does that mean if you're an actor on a top-rated TV sitcom? Sure, the iron is hot, but how exactly do you strike it? What do you strike it with? Do you try to get a movie deal? Endorse a chain of frozen yogurt places? Start a chain of frozen yogurt places?

These were the questions facing Donny Most in 1976. A showbiz lifer who'd been performing since childhood, he was suddenly mega-famous due to his portrayal of jokester Ralph Malph on Happy Days. This was as hot as the iron was ever going to get, and Donny struck it. Specifically, he signed a deal with United Artists and recorded a mix of golden oldies and relatively recent tracks for the label. The resulting LP, cleverly titled Donny Most, was not exactly a chartbuster in its day but gained something of a following among Happy Days fans and was even reissued on CD some years ago. 

But is the darned thing even listenable to modern ears? That's what my cohost and I try to find out this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. We were both familiar with one track, the boldly-titled "Rock is Dead," but what about the other nine? I hope you will accompany us on this strange musical journey.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

The elusive T.K. Peters, sometimes misidentified as Ed Wood.

Encyclopedia of Sex ad

As I prepared to write this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I decided to do a quick search of eBay, to see if the old myth of Dr. T.K. Peters being a pseudonym of Ed Wood still persists. You guessed it (merely one example, sadly). Apart from inflating prices, it continues to muddy the waters of Woodology, this muddying now its own niche within the larger spectrum. Dr. T.K. Peters was real, and we'll refute some counter-claims that his esteemed name was "borrowed" from the real "Kim" in future Ed Wood Wednesdays.

In the past, Pendulum Publishers, Inc. and its myriad offshoot imprints (covered ad nauseam in previous posts) published two series of photo-illustrated sexual paperbacks in the early 1970s, sourced from the comprehensive sexual study by Dr. T.K. Peters that he sold to Pendulum boss Bernie Bloom (itself rooted in his work as a marriage counselor in Atlanta from 1950 through 1965, following his retirement from Oglethorpe University...but that's another story that WILL be told). 

Fully three-fourths of the Peters' titles constituted SECS Press' (an unincorporated Pendulum imprint) Encyclopedia of Sex, the rest being the Sexual Enlightenment Series published under the Calga imprint, unleashed just on the cusp of legal, accessible and affordable hardcore sexual imagery via multi-media. For some alchemical reason, the censorship damn bursting encouraged a propensity toward the weird, the extreme and the just plain fucking nuts. In all, between Ed's own resume and an additional few titles in his collection with title-page inscriptions by him, Ed wrote or co-wrote roughly 25% of the Peters paperbacks. That index, too, is another story. Suffice to say that Ed's cohort on West Pico in the Pendulum mag office played a large role in the Pendulum Peters canon. Ed collaborated with fellow staffers Charles D. Anderson and Leo Eaton. William D. "Bill" Jones produced Peters, and so did Robin "Redbreast" Eagle. They did this under a slew of pseudonyms, one of them, Norman Bates, still falsely claimed a pseudonym of Ed. It's impossible to talk about T.K. Peters without running into these clumsy mis-Ed-tributions. That's a charitable statement and I'll leave it at that.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 87: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" (1975)

This week, Eddie takes us back into nudie movie history.

A coin-operated peep show.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. is, for better or worse, still known primarily as a filmmaker rather than a writer. Even though Eddie's books and articles represent a vast and colorful body of work, rich in themes and ripe for rediscovery, most documentaries about the man make only passing references to his writing career. A typical doc might show a couple of paperback covers from the 1960s before going back to talking about Ed's movies. Cue the umpteenth clip of model flying saucers dangling on the ends of strings.

If people haven't read Nightmare of Ecstasy or Muddled Mind, they may have no idea that Ed Wood was a writer at all, other than his screenplays. Part of the problem has been availability. Due to rights issues, only a few of Ed's dozens of novels (Killer in Drag, Devil Girls, Death of a Transvestite) are readily available on sites like Amazon today. The rest are expensive collectors' items. In recent years, the anthologies Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever have made nearly a hundred of Eddie's short stories easily accessible to his fans. But this represents merely a tiny fraction of Wood's written output

And Ed Wood's nonfiction remains even less known than his fiction, if that's possible. While Eddie's short stories and novels have been somewhat neglected over the years, his fact-based articles and books, nearly all of them sexual or sex-adjacent in nature, have been basically abandoned. Almost no one writes about this material, voluminous though it is. So, today, I thought I'd shed some light on one of Eddie's lesser-known nonfiction works from later in his career.

The story: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" Originally published in Body & Soul, vol. 8, no. 1, May/June 1975. Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

A "camp" classic.

Synopsis: Though the porno film may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, it's actually part of a heritage that goes back to the earliest days of filmed entertainment. In the old days, there were arcades with hand-cranked machines that allowed the viewer to flip through photographs. Then there were primitive "peep shows" that displayed brief filmed striptease routines. Eventually these shows evolved, adding color and full nudity. Many of these shows focused on nudist camps, since that setting allowed filmmakers to present nudity in a non-sexual way. Eventually, the appeal of these nudist films wore off, and the coin-operated machines weren't profitable enough for film producers or arcade owners.

The next step was projecting these films onto a big screen for an audience, rather than showing them to one viewer at a time. Nudity started becoming commonplace in theatrically exhibited films made after World War II and shown at burlesque theaters. Some of these films had stories, but many were simply the same old strip shows of the past. Patrons back then would sit through live strippers and old newsreels before getting to see the films. Even though these films were cheaply made and shown in black-and-white, they initially attracted long lines of curious spectators.

But this, too, lost its novelty, and producers realized they would have to invest more money in these movies. Some of that money came from theater owners who depended on the producers to stay in business. By the mid-1960s, the movies featured some "petting and kissing" between boys and girls. And, at long last, color became standard. But the stories were still "weak." Ultimately, knowledgeable audiences simply demanded that the films include actual sex. And this practice continues now, despite the efforts of "pressure groups," who have only succeeded in making sex films into a thriving multi-million-dollar business.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 21: "Necromania" (1971)

Ed Wood's return to directing came in 1971 with the X-rated Necromania. 

   

"We thought he was making a comedy, to tell you the bloody truth."

-Ric Lutze, an actor in Ed Wood's Necromania

  

Goodbye, Tor.

And now it is 1971. Whether he knows it or not, Edward Davis Wood, Jr. has only seven years to live. He and his wife, Kathy, have lost their little house on Bonner Street in North Hollywood and have moved into the seedy, violence-prone Mariposa Apartments at the intersection of Yucca and Cahuenga in LA. Before the year is out, Ed's longtime friend and long-ago star, Tor Johnson, will have died of heart failure at the age of 67. Nevermore will the ex-wrestler break one of Ed's insufficiently-reinforced toilet seats with his massive bulk.

Meanwhile, the world seems to be growing stranger and uglier by the day. President Nixon promises his 207 million constituents that he will end the nation's involvement in Vietnam. Public support for the war dwindles every day, especially when an American-supported SVA offensive in Cambodia fails after six miserable weeks.

On the homefront, the so-called "generation gap," a moral and aesthetic schism between the old and the young, has been turned into a sitcom, rechristened All in the Family, and given a spot on the CBS Saturday night lineup, right before Funny Face with Sandy Duncan. There are astronauts driving a buggy on the moon. The boxer once known as Cassius Clay has KO'd a draft-dodging rap. And down in Orlando, Walt Disney World finally opens five years after the death of its nameake.

On the radio, the ex-Beatles are either singing hymns to God ("My Sweet Lord") or questioning His very existence ("Imagine"). On movie screens, Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood are both playing rule-flouting, fascistic cops to critical and popular acclaim, either acting as the urban saviors for whom we've been praying or embodying all our worst fears about what happens when power goes unchecked. Elsewhere in cinema, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange asks us which is more disturbing: an amoral generation of lawless punks who steal, rape, and kill simply to relieve their boredom.. or a totalitarian government which will resort to truly perverse and unnatural measures to stop them?

Clearly, it is a time of transition for America.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 280: 'Christine Jorgensen Reveals' (1957)

Trans woman Christine Jorgensen released a very interesting album in 1957!

Here's the damnedest thing about doing research. While you're looking for information about one subject, you're bound to find a bunch of other, unrelated material you'd never even heard of and weren't searching for. And suddenly, instead of just working on one topic, you'll be working on three or four. At least, that's what often happens to me. 

A most unusual LP from 1957.

Recently, for my Happy Days podcast, These Days Are Ours, I was delving into the history of actor Donny Most's self-titled 1976 pop album. We'd never reviewed an album on our show before, so I didn't know exactly where to start. But I have a book specifically about albums and singles recorded by celebrities: Goldmine's Celebrity Vocals (1994) by Ron Lofman. While leafing through this volume—a fun and informative book, by the way—I stumbled onto something I'd never known: pioneering trans woman Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989), whose life inspired Ed Wood's first feature film, had recorded a spoken-word album in 1957!

I knew I'd have to hear this LP for myself. Fortunately, it has been uploaded to the internet in all its crackly, monophonic glory. Six years after her highly-publicized surgery in Denmark and four years after Ed Wood turned her story into Glen or Glenda (1953), Christine released a 50-minute interview album simply titled Christine Jorgensen Reveals on J Records, a New York vanity label that existed only for this one album. (The J presumably stood for Jorgensen.) The liner notes declare:

Christine Jorgensen is unquestionably the most publicized, most controversial and interesting personality of this generation. 

In this album hear her PERSONALLY discuss in an open and frank interview the enigma of her transformation and the subsequent electrifying experiences of her phenomenal career. 

For the rare moment when your guests have become bored with musical sounds... give this LP a spin. Everyone will be delightfully entertained by this witty, exciting and informative interview.

Though she was making her living as a nightclub singer at that point, the LP contains no songs and no music at all apart from brief instrumentals at the beginning and end. Instead, for the better part of an hour, Christine fields questions from a male interviewer regarding her surgery, her stage act, her love life, her body, and the reaction she's gotten from the press and the public. She is remarkably plainspoken and forthcoming about all these topics.

This album is full of surprises, not the least of which is the identity of its mysterious host. The interviewer is listed on the record sleeve merely as "R. Russell." As confirmed by multiple sources, this is comedian and actor Nipsey Russell (1918-2005), noted for his many appearances on TV game shows and talk shows and for his role as the Tin Man in The Wiz (1978). Nipsey was already an established nightclub comedian by the time he made this record and was starting to make inroads into television and film but was not yet a household name. On Christine Jorgensen Reveals, he keeps his wisecracking comedic persona largely in check without being overly formal or self-serious. His responsibility here is to act as a surrogate for the listeners, asking Christine Jorgensen the questions they themselves would like to ask.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 279: 'The Valley Obscured by Smog' (2026)

W. Paul Apel's new novel catches up with Ed Wood in his later days.

The world is so small sometimes, it's a miracle we all fit in it. 

Ron Howard as Richie Cunningham.

If you read this blog for anything other than the Ed Wood content, you know that I cohost a podcast about the long-running nostalgic sitcom Happy Days, which originally aired from 1974 to 1984. The show stars actor-turned-director Ron Howard as Richie Cunningham, a mild-mannered Wisconsin lad navigating his high school and college years and dreaming someday of becoming a writer. 

After seven seasons, Ron left the series in 1980 to focus on his producing and directing career, so his Happy Days character is said to have "joined the Army." In the show's final season, Richie finally returns home to Wisconsin, a wife and family in tow. His father, Howard (Tom Bosley), announces he has lined up a job for Richie at the local newspaper, The Milwaukee Journal, but Richie has other plans: he's moving to Hollywood to make it as a screenwriter!

In real life, one of Ron Howard's earliest cinematic projects away from Happy Days was a romantic comedy called Leo and Loree (1980), which he co-wrote and executive produced for his own company, Major H Productions. The film, which stars fellow Happy Days alum Don Most, tells the story of an ambitious recent college graduate named Leo Greene who defies his father's wishes, forsakes a respectable teaching career, and moves to Hollywood to make it as an actor. Having no connections in town whatsoever, he crashes on the couch of an old friend of his named Dennis (David Huffman). Our in-depth review of Leo and Loree was released just yesterday. In fact, I was editing it while I was preparing this very article!

Given all this background, you can imagine my state of déjà vu when I received a copy of W. Paul Apel's new Ed Wood-inspired novel, The Valley Obscured by Fog (Bear Manor Media, 2026). The book centers around Alan Starkwell, a recent college graduate who disappoints his parents when he turns down a newspaper job his father has lined up and moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. Alan, too, crashes in the home of a former classmate. He even cites the film American Graffiti (1973) starring Ron Howard as inspiration for wanting to get into the movies!

Podcast Tuesday: "Little Movie 'Bout Leo and Loree"

Don Most and Linda Purl in Leo and Loree (1980).

Doing a podcast about Happy Days involves many hours of writing, research, and editing, but the actual recording of a typical episode is a mere blip. Every other Sunday, my cohost and I spend about an hour or so chatting over Zoom. This gets edited down to about 30-40 minutes of usable audio, to which I will then add various clips from movies, TV shows, and pop records. These Days Are Ours is a show that is largely made in editing, each episode pieced together from lots of little scraps.

These nearly ruined the show.

Recording is, by far, my favorite part of the process. It just goes by so quickly that it feels like a barely-remembered dream. At least, it usually does. But something strange happened when it was time to record our review of Leo and Loree (1980), a romantic comedy starring Donny Most and Linda Purl as young Hollywood hopefuls. I had chosen this movie as a topic for review, so I felt responsible for this particular installment of the podcast. The onus was on me to make this one work.

I'd woken up a couple of hours before we were set to record. My sinuses were acting up that day, so I took some allergy medicine. For some reason, the little pink pills kicked in especially hard and started messing with my head. Maybe it was because I hadn't eaten anything. By the time we were supposed to record, I was dizzy and drowsy and barely coherent. I couldn't talk about a Don Most movie for an entire hour in this condition! What was I going to do?

Fortunately, I have very little to say in the first few minutes of our show. I just have to say my name and the title of the movie or TV show we're reviewing, then my cohost launches into a detailed plot summary. This always gives me about 5-10 minutes where I'm off-mic. So to combat the effects of the allergy medicine, I just started drinking anything caffeinated I could find. When it was time for me to speak, I was keyed-up and nervous. The caffeine and the allergy medicine interacted oddly, and I struggled mightily to stay on topic and express myself in a coherent way.

I knew this episode was going to be a mess to edit, and it was. Hopefully, though, you won't even be able to tell because I've cut all of my unexpected, weirdly-timed pauses and rambling, meaningless sentences out of the finished product. Just know that, as you listen to this installment of our podcast, one of the hosts is fighting the battle of his life just to keep from babbling like an idiot or falling asleep.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 278: "A Child's Garden of Extroversion" (1939)

Two greats square off: Criswell and S.J. Perelman.

"I am not only witty in myself but the cause that wit is in other men."

-Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 (1600)

It's strange to think that the Amazing Criswell (1907-1982) did not arrive fully formed into this world. After all, the man seemed so innately himself, both in print and on camera, that it's difficult to imagine him doing anything else. But he was not always the pompadoured, tuxedoed showman we see in Ed Wood movies, confidently spouting (inaccurate) predictions and waxing philosophical about time and space. Long before the books, the movies, the newspaper columns, and the TV talk shows, he was merely Jeron Criswell King from Princeton, Indiana.

An ad for Criswell's books.

Much like his Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) castmate Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, Cris cycled through various identities and professions before landing on the gimmick that would make him cultishly famous. In 1935, after a failed teaching career, he relocated to New York and spent a few years trying to establish himself as a radio personality, playwright, and stage actor. During this period in his life, he met and married the equally outlandish Myrtle Louise Stonesifer (1905-1985) aka Louise Howard aka Halo Meadows.

Cris and Halo wrote a series of utterly bizarre how-to guides, most of them about making it in show business. (On some of their books, a third author named Arthur Jones is listed.) Though they had not found much success in the entertainment field yet, they were cheerfully selling books about how to make it as an actor, a songwriter, or a playwright. Definitely a case of "fake it 'til you make it."

These books are not commonly found today on the secondary market, but I have a xeroxed copy of one: How to Crash Tin Pan Alley from 1939. It's ostensibly a how-to book for songwriters. It explains how newcomers can get their compositions published, recorded, and performed. Since Criswell and his cohorts knew absolutely nothing about songcraft, the book assumes you can handle that part of the process yourself without their help. Instead, they focus on the music industry and the many pitfalls that a young, inexperienced songwriter may encounter while navigating it, from skeptical publishers to egotistical singers. The tone of the book is very similar to Ed Wood's own posthumously-published showbiz guide, Hollywood Rat Race (1998). Somehow, Cris and Halo managed to wrangle an introduction from celebrated jazz bandleader Sammy Kaye (1910-1987).

Since neither Criswell nor Halo Meadows ever became a hit songwriter, I wasn't sure what kind of cultural impact How to Crash Tin Pan Alley ever had. My xeroxed edition of the book was made from a copy at the University of Illinois, where it had been checked out numerous times over the years, starting in 1943. The most recent stamp on the inside cover said February 18, 1999. Imagine that! As late as Bill Clinton's second term, someone was still taking highly dubious career advice from Criswell! 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 277: "Edward D. Wood Jr.: Hollywood Underground" (1987)

Five years before his book came out, Rudolph Grey gave us a preview of Nightmare of Ecstasy.

Author Rudolph Grey.

When musician-turned-author Rudolph Grey published Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. in 1992, it was a true breakthrough in the field of Woodology, one that has arguably never been matched. There had been numerous articles published about Wood and his movies by then, as well as the feature-length documentary On the Trail of Ed Wood (1990), but there was nothing with the scope and ambition of Grey's book. Nightmare contained not only the most complete filmography and bibliography for Ed Wood ever assembled to that time, but also interviews with numerous Wood associates and a whole host of rarely-seen photographs and other documents. Over 30 years after its publication, Nightmare remains the gold standard in its field.

A book like Nightmare of Ecstasy doesn't just happen overnight. In fact, the book was more than a decade in the making. When I attended a public appearance by Grey in 2014, he went into some detail about his working process. His research for Nightmare started in roughly the early 1980s. Eddie had just died, unfortunately, but plenty of his cohorts were still around. (Nearly all of them have since died.) And other authors shared their research with Grey, including interviews they'd conducted with Eddie toward the end of his life. It must have been a massive task, taking all this material and shaping it into a coherent book.

In 1987, Grey was still five years away from publishing Nightmare of Ecstasy, but he had accumulated enough material to write an article for Filmfax #6 called "Edward D. Wood Jr.: Hollywood Underground." And if you've already guessed that this article is the focus of today's column, you're right! Treat yourself to something nice! I thought it might be interesting to compare this article to the book and see where they overlap and where they diverge.

Podcast Tuesday: "You Wanna Get Jobs? Come On! Let's Get Jobs!"

Michael Keaton and Jim Belushi in the pilot for Working Stiffs.

What is it that makes one sitcom a hit and another one a flop? Why do some shows live on in reruns for decades while others simply evaporate from the prime time schedule without a trace? No one really knows. If there were a formula for this stuff, someone would have figured it out a long time ago and we'd have nothing but hits. And, as we all know, television history is littered with the corpses of unsuccessful programs.

Even with the best of planning, each new TV show is a gamble. You start with a premise that seems workable and could generate lots of compelling stories. Then you hire actors you think will connect with the audience, and you assemble a production team that can create a quality show while meeting strict deadlines. Once that's all in place, it's up to the marketing department to create promotions that will ignite the public's imagination and drive traffic to the show. Something could go wrong at any stage in this process, and it could be enough to sink the entire enterprise.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're covering the pilot for an extremely short-lived sitcom from 1979 called Working Stiffs. It was co-created by Happy Days showrunner Bob Brunner and tells the story of two bumbling brothers who convince their uncle to give them jobs as janitors in a Chicago office building. The brothers are played by two actors who went on to fame and fortune: Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton. The production team includes many sitcom veterans with long, successful careers in television. And CBS gave the show an enthusiastic promotional push. Working Stiffs was canceled after four weeks.

What went wrong? That's what we'll try to figure out as we review the show's pilot episode. Please do join us by clicking on the play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 276: "Paul Marco Remembers Ed Wood Jr." (1987)

Friends 'til the end: Paul Marco (right) and Ed Wood.

Something wonderful has been happening recently in the online Ed Wood fan community. A gentleman named Jason Insalaco has been sharing some rarely-seen photographs of his great-uncle, eccentric character actor Paul Marco (1927-2006), to an Ed Wood discussion group on Facebook. We all remember Paul as the bumbling, cowardly Officer Kelton in three of Eddie's best-known films: Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). Kelton reminds me of those wacky comic relief sidekicks they'd put into every action-adventure cartoon I watched as a kid. He's the Ed Wood equivalent of Snarf on Thundercats, Gleek on Superfriends, or Orko on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

But we should remember that there's more to Paul Marco than just being Officer Kelton. In addition to having a life and career all his own, he was a key member of Ed Wood's personal and professional circle for many years. In Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Paul is portrayed by Doogie Howser star Max Casella as an eager but not-too-bright young man who will blindly follow Eddie (Johnny Depp) wherever he chooses to go, even if it's straight off a cliff. While this makes for some amusing scenes, it hardly gives us a complete picture of who Paul Marco was. The reality was more nuanced and complex than that.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 275: "Remembering Ed D. Wood, Jr." (1987)

Tor Johnson attacks Bela Lugosi in the pages of Filmfax.

A feature about Ed.

I was not a major reader of sci-fi and horror movie magazines when I was a kid. Oh, sure, I'd skim through Fangoria and the like at the local Walgreen's, but I rarely brought any issues home with me. What did I have to buy them with, my sparkling personality? If my parents gave me a couple of bucks to spend in those days, I'd buy comic books or MAD instead. Even as a teenager and young adult, I only bought movie magazines if they contained an article I really wanted. Any substantial story about John Waters, for instance, warranted an immediate purchase. By the late 1990s, when I was in college, I was largely getting my movie information from the internet.

As a result, I missed out on the print magazines that were so influential on other budding film fanatics, especially those of previous generations. This week, I'm choosing to spotlight just one of those gone-but-not-forgotten publications: Filmfax, which ran for 166 issues from 1986 to 2024. The creation of editor Michael Stein, Filmfax originally billed itself as "The Magazine of Unusual Film & Television." By the end of its run, that tagline had changed to "The Magazine of Unusual Film, Television & Retro Pop Culture." In its sixth issue, dated March/April 1987, Filmfax ran a sprawling,12-page feature about writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr. It consisted of:

• a career overview, including quotes from actor and friend David Ward

• a preview of Rudolph Grey's then-untitled Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992)

• an extended interview with actor and Wood associate Paul Marco (1927-2006)

• a filmography compiled by Jan Henderson

This wasn't even Filmfax's first Ed Wood feature, since they spotlighted Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) in the very first issue. In those primitive, pre-internet days, a magazine like this must have been a veritable goldmine of valuable information for Wood fans. But does it still have anything to offer us in 2026? Let's find out.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Marshall-Belson Experiments"

Will Hutchins and Sandy Baron on Hey, Landlord!

One of the strangest major studio movies of the '90s was Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998), an extremely literal remake of the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic of the same name. If you've ever seen Van Sant's film, you know that it is a curiously empty, uninvolving experience. The actors are self-conscious and ill-at-ease, and scene after scene falls flat. But why doesn't it work? Van Sant's actors, including Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, are faithfully reenacting the original. The cast and crew are certainly talented enough. Shouldn't it be just as good? There must be some intangible element that is missing from the remake.

A classic episode.

This phenomenon can work in reverse, too, when a remake outshines its predecessor. I'll give you an example. One of the most famous episodes of Garry Marshall's Laverne & Shirley is "Guinea Pigs" (original airdate: January 18, 1977), in which the title characters participate in kooky medical experiments in order to earn some money to attend a fancy cocktail party. The problem is, the girls are so zonked-out from the experiments (Laverne has been deprived of regular sleep, Shirley of normal food) that they struggle mightily to make it through the party once they get there. Like Hitchcock's Psycho, "Guinea Pigs" is considered a classic in its field.

What I didn't know until recently is that the plot of "Guinea Pigs" is recycled from a previous Garry Marshall sitcom, Hey, Landlord!, which ran from 1966 to 1967. This earlier show revolves around two roommates, Woody (Will Hutchins) and Chuck (Sandy Baron), sharing a bachelor pad in a New York brownstone. In "Testing... One, Two," the boys agree to take part in some medical experiments so they can have the money to rent tuxedos for a neighbor's photography exhibition. You can probably guess how it turns out. It's the same story that worked so well on Laverne & Shirley, but I'll bet you've never heard of, let alone seen, "Testing...One, Two." Why is that?

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I review the Hey, Landlord! episode and try to deconstruct why this series never caught on. We'd be most appreciative if you would join us. The podcast is available right here:

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 274: 'Conrad Talks Hollywood' (2011)

Remember My Dinner with Andre? Well, this is My Car Ride with Conrad.

"Marcel Proust was a very famous writer who used to dip biscuits in his cup of tea and suck on the biscuits, and all his memories come flooding back, and he wrote them down into wonderful novels."

-Peter Cook, "Memoirs of a Miner" (1985)

John Carpenter's debut feature Dark Star (1974) is a low-budget sci-fi comedy about a small crew of astronauts, all of them male, who have been out in space for 20 years and have gone completely buggy from the experience. Their vessel, the scoutship Dark Star, has not been properly maintained and is rapidly falling apart. Their mission, essentially bulldozing a path through space for future colonization, seems utterly pointless. They've long since lost interest in themselves and each other. And they're officially out of toilet paper. It's a real bummer, man.

Powell on ice.

To make matters worse, their leader, Commander Powell (Joe Saunders) has died, so laid-back ex-surfer Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle), has taken his place. Sort of. He's kind of half-assing the job, to be honest. Meanwhile, immature crew members Pinback (Dan O'Bannon) and Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) are squabbling like siblings, while the eerily zoned-out Talby (Dre Pahich) has retreated to the safety of a bubble at the top of the ship. When the Dark Star faces a life-or-death emergency (which I will not spoil), the overwhelmed Doolittle reaches a strange conclusion: "I have to ask Commander Powell." 

Yes, the dead man's body has been kept in cold storage, and his mind can still be accessed through a radio-like electronic device. The frostbitten Powell is no longer at the peak of freshness, though, and Doolittle struggles to keep him on track. (The commander is more interested in baseball than the safety of his former crew.) This plot element is imported directly from the fiction of Philip K. Dick, who wrote about communicating with the frozen dead via radio in Ubik (1969) and What the Dead Men Say (1964).

While crafting these articles, I've often found myself wishing I could access the mind of my colleague Greg Javer (1968-2024) the same way Doolittle did with Commander Powell. Many is the time I have thought, "I wonder what Greg would say about this?" Sadly, the technology that Philip K. Dick described in his fiction is not available in reality. At least not yet. We may get there someday. Until then, the best I can do is go through Greg's old articles and see if I can find some inspiration or information there.

To that end, I recently revisited an article Greg wrote in 2020 about actor/director Conrad Brooks (1931-2017), a key member of Ed Wood's repertory company and a low-budget filmmaker in his own right. Greg briefly mentioned a documentary short called Conrad Talks Hollywood (2011) that I'd never heard of. I kept meaning to watch it but never got around to it. Well, I figured that this week was as good a time as any.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 273: 'Plan 69 from Outer Space' (1993)

This was director Frank Marino's other Ed Wood parody from the 1990s.

It is surprisingly easy to romanticize the adult film industry of the 1970s. This was the decade of "porno chic" when it briefly became fashionable, even respectable, for couples to attend X-rated movies. The stars of these productions, like Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, and Marilyn Chambers, became household names. The movies themselves were shot on actual film, and directors like Gerard Damiano and Radley Metzger actually attempted to tell stories. This is the era eulogized in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), which ends just as the industry is pivoting to home video.

Podcast Tuesday: "Cyndiana Jones and the Temple of Goldblum"

Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum in Vibes.

Thanks to MTV, the music video became the format of choice in the 1980s. Rock stars were accustomed to recording albums, releasing singles, and performing concerts, but they were now expected to star in little four-minute movies as well. Some of them proved exceptionally good at it, and it's only natural that a few would try their luck at making full-length motion pictures. And so, photogenic MTV superstars like Madonna and Prince embarked upon movie careers with wildly mixed results. Occasional hits like Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and Purple Rain (1984) were inevitably followed by flops like Shanghai Surprise (1986) and Under the Cherry Moon (1986).

New York-born songstress Cyndi Lauper was a little late to the party when she made her motion picture debut in the quirky supernatural comedy Vibes (1988) opposite Jeff Goldblum. It arrived in theaters a year after Madonna had suffered her second major flop with Who's That Girl (1987). If the American economy could not support Madonna's movie career, what chance did Cyndi have? Not much, as it turned out. Vibes bombed hard during a busy movie summer dominated by Cocktail (1988) and Die Hard (1988), and Cyndi Lauper mostly went back to singing with only occasional movie and TV roles.

Was this fair? As luck would have it, Vibes was written by two Happy Days veterans, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. That makes it a fitting topic for the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Join us this week as we weigh in on both the film and Cyndi Lauper's viability as a movie star.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 272: The world's on fire so we might as well watch 'Glen and Glenda' (1994)

What a difference a conjunction makes! This is not Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda.

"The eastern world, it is exploding." So what else is new? The eastern world was exploding before I got here, and it'll be exploding long after I'm gone. Look, folks, we may be hurtling toward World War III any day now. Or we may not. I just know that I get a sinking feeling whenever I make the mistake of checking the news. If Armageddon is just around the corner, we'd better have some fun now, huh?

Case in point: recently, reader Edward Fisher contacted me to ask if I were ever going to review the 1994 adult film Glen and Glenda, a direct parody of Ed Wood's debut feature Glen or Glenda (1953). He wrote: "It's an adult film that uses Ed's script almost word for word. Other than the sex scenes it's basically a remake." Normally, I might turn up my nose at something like this. A mid-1990s shot-on-video cheapie probably made in an afternoon or two by people I've never heard of? Not too appetizing. But I'm in a Tyler Durden-ish "let's burn it all down and start over from scratch" kind of mood lately. So what the heck? Let's watch this thing.

Edward kindly offered to lend me his DVD, but the movie itself was pretty easily located online. No, I'm not going to link to it. Do you know how much I already had to censor that header image up there to make it "acceptable" on this platform? Well, it was a bunch. We are living in the golden age of cyber-prudes. I can't take chances. You know how search engines work. Find it yourself. But be forewarned! The Chucky franchise has characters called Glen and Glenda, too, so you'll have to scroll through a lot of "killer doll" stuff before you get to the movie.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 271: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 4]

Young Eddie (Johnny Depp) carries a palm tree across the Universal backlot.

"He worked at Universal, and he never recovered."

That was the verdict of actor, raconteur, and noted fabulist John Andrews (1941-1991) on his friend and occasional employer, Edward D. Wood, Jr. The story is almost too perfect to be believed: Eddie grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY watching classic Universal productions like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) and then actually got to work for the studio when he moved to Hollywood as a young man. While there, he saw how Universal would provide whatever resources a director might need—like, say, piles of sand for an Abbott & Costello picture set in the desert. As a no-budget, no-frills independent filmmaker, Eddie often struggled to provide such niceties as sets and props for his own movies and would think back wistfully to his days at Universal.

I have never seen much evidence to document Ed Wood's time at Universal Studios. No time cards, paycheck stubs, contracts, employee IDs, or even photos of him on the backlot. In the documentary The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1996), actor Lyle Talbot recalls working with Eddie at Universal, but the film he mentions is Chinatown Squad (1935), which was made well before Eddie's time there. Lyle might be thinking of a completely different kid named Eddie. The only other remnants of Ed Wood's tenure at the studio are some vague anecdotes from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy:The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). I've compiled all the relevant quotes from that book I could find:

Podcast Tuesday: "The Young People of Today, Am I Right?"

Tom Bosley voices Harry Boyle (center), a harried suburban dad on Love, American Style.

There are two basic types of classic sitcom dads: the grouchy, cantankerous ones who yell at their kids and the calm, reasonable ones who say things like, "Gosh, I'm very disappointed in you." In the early days of TV, most sitcoms had the second type. Witness such series as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963), My Three Sons (1960-1972), and Father Knows Best (1954-1960), all of which had even-tempered patriarchs. Danny Thomas started to change that with Make Room for Daddy (1953-1964), and by the 1970s, we were finally ready for Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) on All in the Family (1971-1979).

Meanwhile, over in the world of animation, Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones (1960-1966) and The Jetsons (1962-1963). were allowed to have agitated, grousing husbands and fathers. You could say that Fred Flintstone and George Jetson made the world safe for Harry Boyle, an overworked, overstressed suburbanite voiced by Tom Bosley on Hanna-Barbera's syndicated series, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (1972-1974).

As it happens, the pilot episode for Wait aired as a segment on ABC's comedy anthology Love, American Style (1969-1974). Yes, this was the same place where the Happy Days pilot had aired back in 1971! This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I give our opinions on that pilot. Click below to hear our take on "Love and the Old-Fashioned Father."