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.