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 & 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!

Capote's Christmas classic.

Apel's book is not about Happy Days—not even close—though some of the days described in this story are pretty festive. Instead, it's a novel about the adult film and publishing industry in the 1970s. We're in Boogie Nights (1997) territory here. Our young hero, Alan, is not making much progress on his own dramatic screenplay and can't land a position at a major studio either, so he gets a steady job writing "dirty" stories and articles for a company called Pendulum Publishing. There he meets a broken-down alcoholic named Ed Wood, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. Soon, Alan is serving as Eddie's assistant on a low budget porn film called Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love.

You'll think I'm kidding, but The Valley Obscured by Fog reminded me of Truman Capote's 1956 short story "A Christmas Memory." That bittersweet tale, set in the early 1930s in rural Alabama, concerns a young boy, Buddy, and his elderly, somewhat dotty female cousin. Together, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, Buddy and his cousin travel around to various locations near their home in search of supplies for the upcoming holiday, including whiskey for the fruitcakes they plan to make. Despite their lack of money, they simply enjoy each other's company and cheerfully exchange homemade kites as gifts. Sadly, at the story's conclusion, Buddy is sent away to military school, and his cousin succumbs to dementia and old age. The boy is heartbroken by his cousin's death and reflects:

"That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven."

In Apel's novel, Alan and Eddie travel around Hollywood, purchasing props and hiring actors for Necromania. They spend a portion of the film's $7,000 budget on a taxidermized wolf that Eddie insists on calling a "wolf mummy." They meet with John Holmes at Tail o' the Cock but sneak out when he's in the bathroom, sticking him with the bill. They attend a performance by Rene Bond at a strip club and convince her to be in their movie. At Eddie's fleabag apartment, they feast on canned spaghetti, washed down with cheap booze from Pla-Boy liquor. This mirrors a sequence in "A Christmas Memory" in which Buddy and his cousin sample some of the leftover whiskey and become giggly. It's interesting to me that Eddie and Alan are often scolded by their boss at Pendulum, Bernie Bloom, just the way that Capote's characters are often reprimanded by their humorless relatives.

Capote's story ends in muted tragedy, while The Valley Obscured leaves its characters in a moderately hopeful state, as Eddie and Alan settle in to watch Star Wars (1977) at Mann's Chinese. But a cloud hangs over these two men, just as it did for Buddy and his "friend." It's nice that these two misfits, one just out of college and another in his 50s, have managed to form a friendship in a world that can often be harsh and uncaring. They are a lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven. But life will soon separate them, as it cruelly separated Capote's innocent characters. Eddie's alcoholism has gotten out of control, and he won't live to see the sequel to Star Wars. And the very world he inhabits, the Los Angeles of the 1970s, will ultimately vanish into the ether.

Star Wars fan Charles Bukowski

As the author informs us in the book's supplementary material, The Valley Obscured by Smog originated as a fan script called Ed Wood 2 and was intended as a direct sequel to the 1994 biopic directed by Tim Burton and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Readers familiar with that movie will find numerous parallels in this novel. Just like the Burton film, this novel is about an inexperienced young man who teams up with a somewhat broken-down older man. This time, however, Eddie is the old man, not the young one, and he's the one who calls the hero unexpectedly in the middle of the night to deal with a crisis. And while the 1994 movie included an incongruous cameo from Orson Welles, this novel has (separate) episodes involving Charles Bukowski and Keith Moon!

Mostly, the experience of reading The Valley Obscured by Smog is like walking around in an Ed Wood-themed wax museum where the exhibits can come to life and talk to you for a few minutes. Many of the folks you know from Eddie's movies and from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) are characters here, including Criswell, Shannon Dolder (who becomes a quasi-love interest for the hero), Kathy Wood, and Noel and Bernie Bloom. Poor, beleaguered Bernie serves as the book's blustery equivalent to George Weiss (Mike Starr) in the Tim Burton movie. Vampira and Paul Marco turn up fleetingly as well, and good old Steve Apostolof is name-checked.

In some ways, I'm the perfect person to review this novel, having spent many years marinating in Ed Wood trivia and getting to know all the strange and colorful characters who inhabited Eddie's world. But in other ways, I'm all wrong. I'm too close to this material to have any real perspective on it. I couldn't tell you, for instance, if The Valley Obscured by Smog would resonate with someone not already familiar with Tim Burton's film or Rudolph Grey's book. It's like that recent Masters of the Universe (2026) movie. I grew up with that multimedia franchise, and so its characters and settings had meaning to me. As I watched the movie, I could marvel at seeing a fully-rendered version of the planet Eternia—one that met or exceeded my own imagination—and I could delight in spotting such familiar characters as Trap-Jaw, Evil-Lyn, and Mekaneck. But would a newbie just think this was all random, meaningless junk?

That is for others to determine. What I can say is that, for me, The Valley Obscured by Smog was a quick and highly enjoyable read. With each passing year, it becomes less and less likely that Ed Wood will ever get a sequel, but this novel does the job admirably. Eddie's superfans will definitely want to read it, but once they're done, they should pass along their copies to friends and relatives who aren't steeped in the lore. I'd be mighty curious to hear what normies think of this book.

The Valley Obscured by Smog can be purchased here.

P.S. W. Paul Apel has included a playlist of songs that essentially functions as a soundtrack album for this book. I have taken the liberty of turning this into a YouTube playlist for you to enjoy. These songs will transport you to the days of shag carpeting, wood paneling, and patchouli and put you in the proper mood for the novel.

R.I.P. Schlitz

P.P.S. The characters in this novel are frequently depicted Schlitz beer, which was recently discontinued. I asked Paul if this book were intended as a "eulogy" for Schlitz, and here's what he had to say:

Haha no. However, if I recall, Schlitz has been discontinued and brought back a few times over the years. I have actually never been able to try Schlitz. I just wanted a cheap beer that would have been popular in the 7'0s. Lots of beer fits that bill but a Schlitz won out because it is Joe Don Baker’s beer of choice in the classic  MST3K episode Mitchell. It was a happy coincidence I noticed a fridge full of beer at a Bukowski poetry reading was also Schlitz. Also, not intended as I wrote it, but in retrospect, fitting for Schlitz being a best-selling beer that was in the middle of a decline (they changed the brewing process to cut costs etc) … kinda like Eddie is a shadow of his former self, etc. but I didn’t think about that until long after finishing it. Long story short (too late) it makes me smile because of Mitchell.