Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 270: The Ed Wood/Chuck Berry double feature of 1959! [PART 2]

Two 1950s icons: Chuck Berry and Vampira!

Last week, we talked about how Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) was teamed up with Paul Landres' Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) for a popular, widely-seen double feature that played at dozens of theaters and drive-ins, including numerous bookings in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Delaware, and Connecticut, among many other places. This was how thousands of American teenagers (and a few Canadian ones) saw Eddie's most famous film for the first time, and it must have made a major impression on at least some of them. Who knows? Maybe some future filmmaker attended one of these screenings and thought, "I could do that."

Hal Roach.

As I said, it was likely Plan 9 investor Ed Reynolds who sold the film to a New York company called Distributors Corporation of America circa 1958. That company retitled the film (it had originally been Grave Robbers from Outer Space) and created a vigorous marketing campaign for it, including an iconic if somewhat misleading poster designed by artist Tom Jung. To this day, most prints of the movie still begin with the DCA logo. While none of this was financially advantageous to Ed Wood, at least the movie he considered his pride and joy was getting in front of audiences.

While it was a natural to pair a sci-fi movie with a rock & roll movie, since both genres had such strong teenage appeal in the 1950s, the real connection between Plan 9 and Johnny might have been legendary producer Hal Roach (1892-1992), best known for his work with Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and the Our Gang series. Roach's name turns up periodically in the Ed Wood story as well. Eddie, for instance, remembered meeting comic actor Franklin Pangborn at Hal Roach's studio. And Heather Tanchuck, daughter of screenwriter Nathaniel Tanchuck, had a vague memory of Eddie himself working for Roach. (Considering the Pangborn story, she might've been right!)

Hal Roach bought DCA in 1958, right around the time the company purchased Grave Robbers from Outer Space from Ed Reynolds. In Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), actor Gregory Walcott suggests that it was Roach who brokered the sale. And Hal's son, Hal Roach, Jr. (1918-1972), was one of the producers of Go, Johnny, Go! In his self-titled 1987 autobiography, Chuck Berry recalled spending "five days in Culver City, California, working at the Hal Roach Studio" making Go, Johnny, Go! and being impressed by "all the big movie cameras and technical equipment." The two films also shared a marketing firm, Ben Adler Advertising Services. Adler employee Tom Jung designed the poster for Johnny as well.

But now, I'd like to share with you some of the more interesting newspaper clippings I found related to the Plan 9/Johnny double feature. I'll start with one from the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post dated October 25, 1959:

Vampira or Clark Gable? The choice is yours, Connecticut!

And here's the (Charleston, WV) Sunday Gazette-Mail from October 4, 1959:

(left) The cast of Go, Johnny, Go!; (right) A print ad for the film. 

This next one comes from the October 21, 1959 edition of the Springfield (Vermont) Reporter. There, Plan 9 and Johnny were joined by a third film, the Australian import Smiley Gets a Gun (1958),

And don't forget to pick up your free Halloween masks, kids!

I wanted to point out this ad from the June 29, 1959 edition of The Logan (Ohio) Daily News because of this marvelously overwrought tagline:

The quotes around Bela Lugosi's name are a nice touch as well.

And I just couldn't let you go without showing you this ad from the September 27, 1959 edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I guess, in that city, the movie was known under a slightly different title.

Sorry, folks, outer space is all filled up.

RIP Ritchie Valens.

I suppose all that remains is for me to render a verdict on Go, Johnny, Go! I was predisposed to enjoy this film, since I'm a major fan of the 1950s rock and R&B it features in great abundance. The artists featured here—Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens, The Flamingos, The Cadillacs, Eddie Cochran—are ones I'd be listening to anyway. Sure, these acts are mostly lip-synching to prerecorded performances, but it's still great seeing them on film in their prime. (Comparatively little footage exists of Valens, so this is a rare treat.) And for Chuck Berry's immortal "Johnny B. Goode," the producers have added some horn overdubs not heard on the original 45.

Still today, this movie gets a fair amount of criticism for spending too much time on the story of Johnny Melody, a fictional rock star played by teen idol Jimmy Clanton. It's a fair complaint. While Clanton is a decent singer and even has a string of Top 40 hits to his name, he's simply outclassed by the numerous (!) Rock & Roll Hall of Famers around him. His chaste romance with goody-goody Sandy Stewart is mostly a snooze, and he's too clean-cut and even-tempered to believe as a "troubled" youth. It's like the producers of Go, Johnny, Go! wanted to show the world that rock & roll was nothing to fear, so they put this rather bland, well-kempt young man out front to put parents' minds at ease. Did teenagers in 1959 get fidgety during these scenes? I did.

Meanwhile, Alan Freed and Chuck Berry get to flex their acting chops a little. Freed is quite stiff, but Berry seems to be having fun. Elsewhere in the cast is character actor Phil Arnold, father of future Necromania (1971) star Maria Arnold. (Thanks to Shawn Langrick for pointing out that detail.) And that's not even the only notable father in the cast, since Bryan Cranston's dad, Joe, appears as a bandleader.

Fans of early rock & roll will want to see Go, Johnny, Go! as a souvenir of a rapidly-vanishing era. And I mean it was rapidly vanishing when the film originally came out! Ritchie Valens was already dead by the time the film hit theaters. Eddie Cochran died the next year, and Alan Freed was gone by 1965, his reputation ruined by the payola scandal and his liver destroyed by alcohol. Chuck Berry had problems of his own. In December 1959, the rocker was arrested for violating the Mann Act and later served 20 months in prison. By 1964, the British Invasion was underway, and Go, Johnny, Go! was a museum piece.

And how does Johnny pair with Plan 9? Moderately well, I'd say, but no better than that. Since Plan 9 was the supporting feature on the bill, it would have played first. It's possible that, in comparison to Ed Wood's surrealist sci-fi masterpiece, Johnny would have seemed a little dull in comparison. The audience may have dozed off during one of the lovey-dovey duets between Jimmy Clanton and Sandy Stewart. Last week, I mentioned that Johnny was occasionally paired with Quentin Lawrence's The Crawling Eye (1958). That might have been a better match, since Eye is so dour and stifling that Johnny would seem like a carnival in comparison.

Will Ed Wood fans find anything to enjoy about Johnny? Yes, possibly. A few of the scenes that pit Jimmy Clanton against stodgy adult authority figures (a choir teacher, a theater manager) are so oddly-written and acted that they attain a certain Woodian grandeur. And then there's this bit of philosophical wisdom from Chuck Berry regarding the transient nature of time:

None of that think-back jazz for me! I got enough sweat with the present! The past and future can take care of themselves!

Ed Wood could scarcely have said it better, Chuck.