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 group of grungy-looking guys who have been out in space for 20 years and have gone completely buggy from the experience. Their ship, the Dark Star, has not been properly maintained and is rapidly falling apart. Their mission, 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.