Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 261: More about 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951) and other things

A typical New York sunset, as (not) seen in The Sun Was Setting.

When I started writing this series of articles back in July 2013, my plan was to blitz through Ed Wood's filmography in just a couple of months. And so, I covered a great deal of territory in each article. In the very first week alone, I briefly covered Ed Wood's youth in Poughkeepsie and reviewed Crossroads of Laredo (1948), The Sun Was Setting (1951), Crossroad Avenger (1953), and even Eddie's failed attempts at making TV commercials in the late 1940s. That's absolutely nuts. Nowadays, each one of those topics would get its own individual article, perhaps more than one.

Cut to January 2026. I'm now giving greater attention to these and other topics related to Ed Wood. Last week, for example, I did a deep-dive into Ed's 15-minute made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting. This strange story, centering around a terminally-ill New York woman (Angela Stevens) who cannot leave her apartment, was the one and only production of a short-lived company called W.D.B.C. Films that Eddie formed with his pal Don Davis and two other men, Milton Bowron and Joe Carter. Bowron and Carter were Los Angeles real estate salesmen who never dabbled in show business again. (I'm guessing it was a "fool me once..." situation.)

Was this Ed Wood's assistant?

I expressed interest in two other crew members of The Sun Was Setting: assistant director Hayes Stewart and co-writer and co-director Ben Brody. Neither of these men is even mentioned in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) and neither worked with Ed Wood again. So who were they? Well, the ever-resourceful Ed Wood fan community had some ideas. Shawn Langrick found at least one Hayes Stewart who passed away in 2006. As Shawn writes:

He was definitely in L.A. at the right time. And if it's the right guy, we've got another saga on our hands! He moved to Arizona in the '60s, and it's possible he also was part of a big 17-person fraud case in 1977, and in some of the articles about that incident, it's noted that he starred as the Lone Ranger in a film! I've not yet found that film though.

A very intriguing lead, I must admit. Shawn even found a picture of this Hayes Stewart. It would be amazing if this were the guy who served as Eddie's assistant director. As for Ben Brody, Shawn commented:

There was a Ben Brody who ran a company called BLH Enterprises, which merged with Larry Harmon Films in 1962 and did commercials, industrial films, and tele-films, but I've not been able to find anything else about this Brody or BLH Enterprises, and nothing to suggest he was, or wasn't, one of the Bens you mention. The birth name of Larry Harmon (aka Bozo the Clown), was Lawrence Weiss, and it was very tantalizing to wonder if he was somehow related to either of Eddie's Weiss guys (Adrian or George), but I've found nothing in Harmon's family tree to suggest either was related to him.

One question remains unanswered: why would a 15-minute production limited to one simple set and consisting only of dialogue—no stunts or special effects—require the services of three different directors and two writers? You'd think this was Gone with the Wind (1939) rather than an extremely brief and modest soap opera. Speaking of which, Bob Blackburn mentioned how common 15-minute shows were on both radio and television in the early 1950s. He specifically remembered newscasts of that length. So The Sun Was Setting would not have been such an oddity in its own time.

I thought now would also be a good opportunity to pass along some other interesting feedback I've received recently. This comment came from a reader in Atlanta named Chelsey V. Morton:

I enjoyed your blog on Plan 9 From Outer Space, particularly your comments concerning Hugh Thomas. Hugh was listed as co-producer of Plan 9 and got that money (in part) by "appropriating" his sister's (Mary Davis) inheritance. Both Hugh and Mary were beneficiaries of their father's estate, but Mary never saw a dime. She married J. Max Davis who was best man at my wedding. 

Max played pro-football for the Kansas City Chiefs for two seasons before going to law school and being elected to the Georgia House of Representatives (where we both served). Max and Mary were very close friends. They had some of the props from Plan 9 in the early days, but their kids tore everything up. Hugh never repaid Mary and used what little money he had left to help finance the Western you reference. He lived out his days in California, on Social Security, in a trailer, and sent Mary an annual package of pitted dates at Christmas (which they gave to me because none of the Davis family liked dates).

See, that's why I love having this blog. I get strange and fascinating anecdotes sent to me that I would never have known about otherwise. Not long ago, reader Ed Goldstein sent me this email, which I'd also like to pass along to you.

I often wonder if I'm bugging you with this stuff, but frankly who else can I share it with? And you do attach your email to the blog.

1. A guilty pleasure my wife and I indulge is watching holiday cooking competitions on Food Network. The team competition was called Sweet Empire (never mind why), and in the penultimate episode the show the teams were challenged to create edible polar animals. The host exhorted them to go all out and decorate with "feathers, fur and fluff." Holy crap! I expected Fawn Silver to glide out onto the stage holding a dagger. One can only guess that one of the show's writers slipped that one in for personal fun, knowing .05% of the audience would get it.

2. A Svengoolie show a few months back had a fan send him a gift of a book entitled Universal Horrors. I looked it up and decided to find a copy of my own and got an excellent copy on eBay. Published in 1990, it covers every film the studio made from 1931 to 1946 in the sci-fi/horror/mystery genre. Cutting off at 1946 eliminated Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which makes no sense. To the point, there is a review of Captive Wild Woman from 1943. The plot involves injecting sex hormones from a woman into a female gorilla and creating a hybridized woman from her. It would make sense to RFK Jr.

In critiquing the film, the authors talk about a potential sexual triangle between the woman, the gorilla woman, and a man. They say that the potential story is side stepped, an angle that was not addressed until by Ed Wood in 1958's The Bride and the Beast. Considering that this is post-Medved and pre-Nightmare of Ecstasy it's interesting to see Eddie get some positive vibes.

3. I am a native New Yorker, leaving in my late 20s. I had been recruited to work in aerospace computing in Southern California. I arrived in 1977 and continued to haunt used bookstores as I always had. A gem was the Cherokee, a large store filled with every type of book from baseball to movies. It was located at the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Cherokee.

That location is but a few blocks from the horrible apartment at Yucca Flats. Did Eddie and I pass unnoticed? Had I known who he was, was a rational conversation possible by then? Or would he more likely have hit me up for a few bucks for a bottle of Imperial?

Much more importantly, the Cherokee was across the street from the newly opened Hollywood poster store. For a couple of hundred bucks I could have bought posters and lobby cards from everything Eddie did. But it was a different time in my life.

Wishing you a very happy new year.

Thanks for the kind words and the interesting info, Ed. Emails like this are always appreciated. In fact, email is my preferred method of contact. If you post comments on my blog or attempt to reach me through social media, there's a chance I may not see your message for a while. (Or I may never see it at all.) But I make sure to check my email inbox at least once a day. So if you really have something valuable to share, I'd suggest sending it to my email address.