Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 284: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 3]

A lifetime's worth of memories in just 32 crudely-Xeroxed pages.

A magazine from 1993.

Information is like tap water these days. Any time of the day or night, whenever we want it, it's there for our use. Just turn on the faucet and enjoy. True, there are places in this world where information is decidedly not accessible to all. By the same token, there are places where tap water isn't available either. There are probably places where neither is available. Be glad you don't live in any of those places.

Here, in the land of the free, we have become accustomed to information on demand as well as media on demand. If an album, movie, or TV show isn't available instantly, we declare it "lost." That's how impatient we've become. If you have to go to a library to get it, it doesn't exist. But we should remember that it wasn't always so. There was a time not so long ago when we were much more reliant on printed material and physical media for the information we now take for granted.

Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, a 1981 chapbook by superfans Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin, is a product of that time before the information revolution. In those days, if you wanted details about an offbeat director like Eddie, you had to comb through the archives and maybe contact people who knew him personally. And so they did. Only a handful of Ed Wood's movies were accessible at that time, and much of Ed's career was entirely undocumented. But Randy and Harold cobbled together whatever they could and assembled a 32-page booklet from their findings, which they then distributed via mail order from an office in Hollywood. They called this operation The Edward D. Wood, Jr. Film Appreciation Society or EDWJFAS.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been going through that booklet page by page and seeing how it holds up in 2026. Is it obsolete or does it still have things to teach us today? We've been through the biography section and the filmography, too. But now we reach something truly unusual: a philosophical essay called "Signals from a Dark Saucer" attributed to a "philosopher" named M.J. Kelar. The authors describe this piece as "part of on-going research on the nature of the aesthetic good" and say that the essay "deals with the deeper meaning of the current interest in 'bad films.'" Apart from a fleeting mention in a 1974 issue of The San Bernardino Sun, I can find literally nothing about this M.J. Kelar or what eventually came of this research. Was this philosopher even real? I have no idea.

A 1980 issue of Film Comment.

In the essay, Kelar describes Ed Wood as an artist who "pursues the aesthetically bad with real determination" and says it's noteworthy that Eddie worked in film rather than some more sensible and safe career path. He must have felt the need for self-expression, the author posits. An examination of his most famous work, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), shows how Eddie differs from "a merely-uninspired hack." Even the simplest scenes in the film are disastrous, like a strangely clumsy exchange of dialogue between two mourners (Gloria Dea and Ben Frommer) at a funeral. 

Kelar argues, as I have over the years, that there's a strangeness to Ed Wood's films that can't be attributed merely to a lack of money and other resources. Many independent directors from this era were working under similar circumstances, yet they didn't create films as idiosyncratic and baffling as Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda (1953). Some cash-strapped directors, such as Edward Ulmer, even managed to make aesthetically good films under these conditions. Here, the author refers us to a book called King of the Bs (1975) by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, which contains a chapter on Ulmer.

What makes Plan 9 compelling is that, while we watch it, we wait for Ed Wood's next mistake. What will he do wrong next? It's the opposite of what we do with a master filmmaker. The essay declares Eddie to be an "anti-genius" practicing "creativity-in-reverse." Kelar then acknowledges an essay by J. Hoberman called "Bad Movies" that appeared in the July/August 1980 issue of Film Comment. This was of note to me because one of the books that got me interested in Ed Wood in the first place was Midnight Movies (1983), which Hoberman co-authored with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.

One interesting assertion of "Signals from a Dark Saucer" is that film itself, as a medium, was especially conducive to an anti-genius like Wood. "Misguided" works such as his might not have been tolerated or exhibited in any other medium, Kellar says. But as a filmmaker, Eddie was able to coax money out of investors and create his anti-masterpieces "without the intervention of anyone of discerning taste." The essayist seems to be entirely unfamiliar with Ed Wood's prolific writing career, as we can see from this passage:

Unlike with a literary work, a movie does not require any steady effort on the part of the audience (viz., turning the pages). Thus, the fabric of the work can unravel rather seriously, without the whole thing coming to a halt, in the way that the reading of the novel would when the sentences cease to be grammatical. In the environment where wood's films were shown anything which kept the screen lit for sixty minutes or so counted as a finished movie.

Furthermore, this essay comes from a time when Ed's entire body of work was thought to be a handful of black-and-white feature films made between roughly 1953 and 1960. While Simon and Benjamin were vaguely aware of Ed Wood's later excursions into pornography, the news does not seem to have reached Kelar. According to this essay, a filmmaker like Eddie could only have come along at a time when the "graphic depiction of violence or sex" was not an option. Well, those things definitely became an option during Eddie's lifetime, and he took full advantage of the new permissiveness.

The essay ends with some lofty ruminations about how Ed Wood's movies provide us a glimpse of "a whole subterranean universe" populated by Hollywood outcasts and eccentrics. His stories, Kellar tells us, take place in "an overcluttered, febrile region of the collective psyche, where our disavowed fascinations with flying saucers, pornography, psychic phenomena, nuclear war, and Nazism, all coexist and intertwine." I'm not sure how sincere this essay is or whether the author even existed. If you have any further information about M.J. Kelar or "Signals from a Dark Saucer," do get in touch.

We now progress to a section called "Who's Who in the World of Wood: An Annotated Listing of Some of the People in the Films." What we have here are capsule biographies of a couple dozen individuals, mostly actors, who worked with Eddie in the 1950s. All the folks you'd expect: Criswell, Vampira, Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, Paul Marco, etc. Most of this should be old news to any seasoned Woodologists, but still there are some interesting tidbits. To wit:

• John Breckinridge got his role in Plan 9 "by being in town and having nothing better to do."

• Conrad Brooks' brother, Henry Bederski, returned to his native Baltimore to become a newspaper columnist.

• Criswell predicted, among other things, an epidemic of baldness among women and the near-collision of our planet with one called Bulleron.

• As of the early 1980s, Dolores Fuller was managing rock groups in San Francisco.

• Joanna Lee wrote and produced Babe (1975), a made-for-TV biopic of Olympic athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

• According to the authors, Ed Wood himself wrote and directed Bela Lugosi's Las Vegas revue. While Eddie may have had some input into the script and definitely visited Bela in Vegas during the run of the show, we know that he did not write the entire revue himself and was not the director either. In fact, the extent of Ed's involvement in the Vegas revue is still disputed. 

• Paul Marco's Kelton the Cop was "the closest thing to a likeable character" in Ed Wood's movies. As a child, Paul was a member of a troupe called The Meglin Kiddies.

• Lyle Talbot may be best known for his decade-long run as Joe Randolph on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

• The authors were under the impression that Maila "Vampira" Nurmi also appeared in Revenge of the Dead (1959). She does not. There is a somewhat Vampira-esque character in the film, but it is played by Jeannie Stevens.

The next section of the booklet is "Woodese," a collection of the beautifully mangled and awkward phrases that frequently turn up in Ed Wood's movies. (Typical example: "Dance to that which one is created for.") The title of this section is a nod to legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel (1890-1975), whose odd but memorable phrasings came to be known as "Stengelese." What's especially noteworthy here is that Simon and Benjamin draw not only from Ed's 1950s feature films—Plan 9 and Glenda, plus Bride of the Monster (1955) and Jail Bait (1954)—but also from the unproduced screenplay The Vampire's Tomb, so they obviously had a copy of this document way back in 1981. Frustratingly, they do not identify the sources of any of their quotes, since these have been "omitted for the sake of brevity."

"Woodese" is followed by "The Wisdom of Wood: Quotes from the Films on a Variety of Topics." Fortunately, these quotes are attributed to their respective films, even including the proper character names. There are four subsections: "Wood on Womanhood," "Wood on the State of Life," "Wood on Knowledge," and "Wood at Large." That last category seems to be a catchall with no specific unifying theme. Typically, Plan 9 and Glenda dominate the proceedings, but there's a quote from Jail Bait ("Life is life.") that I'd never noticed, and they even include a line from The Bride and the Beast (1958).

At last, we come to the book's postscript. And it's here that we get some more insight into how this project came about. It all started in May 1981 on the UCLA campus. A planned screening of Plan 9 blossomed into a full-fledged Ed Wood film festival. The organizers contacted Harry Medved, co-author of The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), and soon realized they had stumbled onto a subject far larger than they had originally figured. This booklet was created as a companion to that film festival. The authors acknowledge that A Man and His Films was assembled in a short amount of time and therefore may contain "inaccuracies and omissions," but they challenge other Wood fans to continue the research.

As I can attest, the research did continue. Very much so. At the time this booklet was originally assembled in 1981, there were no full-length books about Edward D. Wood, Jr. or his films. Now Woodology is practically a literary subgenre unto itself. I wonder what Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin would think of all this. If by chance, you know either one of them, have them drop me a line. I'd love to hear from them, if only so I could congratulate them on assembling this still-impressive chapbook.