Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 290: Rene Bond (1950-1996): A Dossier

Rene Bond got a healthy amount of press coverage.

One thing I have accidentally learned in writing this column for over a decade is that America's newspapers have a surprisingly spicy, risque past. Strippers, burlesque houses, and pornographic films were openly advertised in otherwise-ordinary, wholesome daily papers across the country. These were the exact same publications where you'd read Ann Landers or catch up on the latest sports scores. They just treated "adult" advertisers like any other sponsors.

In the 1960s and '70s, fairly bold ads for X-rated movies would habitually run alongside ads for every other kind of movie on the market. It is not impossible, for example, that you could have seen Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972) being promoted next to Disney's Napoleon and Samantha (1972). This is not an exaggeration. This kind of juxtaposition happened nearly every week for years. I constantly come across this stuff in my research. It's why we have newspaper clippings related to Ed Wood's adult films. If they played at an actual movie theater, we probably have ads for them.

This week, I am turning my attention to adult film actress Rene Bond (1950-1996), who starred in Ed Wood's Necromania (1971) and appeared in several more films either written or co-written by Eddie: The Class Reunion (1972), The Cocktail Hostesses (1973), Fugitive Girls (1974), and The Snow Bunnies (1972). She also appeared in the disputed Wood film Bloomer Girl (1972). That's six movies total, more than Tor Johnson, Paul Marco, or Criswell ever did with Ed. Though she occasionally used aliases (including Lilly Lovetree, Lotta Rocks, and Rosemary Camelot), Rene also worked under her own name and was definitely not shy about publicity. So I decided to see what America's newspapers had to say about her.

Podcast Tuesday: "Your Kids Caught You Smoking and They Said No Way"

Tom Bosley and Marion Ross in Let's Call it Quits.

Along with the many, many laws and rules we have to follow in our daily lives, we are also given innumerable warnings about our health and safety. Don't do drugs. Get eight hours of sleep. Brush your teeth. Eat your vegetables. Look both ways before you cross the street. Since human beings are typically averse to being bossed around, I think there is a strong temptation to ignore all of this stuff. To hell with them! I'll do what I want! And I sympathize with that.

But there are some warnings I wish we would have heeded sooner as a society. It certainly would have been better, for instance, if we'd all given up on smoking as soon as the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964. But we didn't. We kept right on smoking for decades, and it led to a lot of needless suffering and death. Only now, in the 21st century, are cigarettes starting to lose their grip on us. (Of course, they're only being replaced by vape pens, but, you know... baby steps.)

Over the years, there were many attempts to get Americans to kick the habit. In 1974, the American Cancer Society produced a half-hour, sitcom-like film called Let's Call it Quits starring Tom Bosley and Marion Ross of Happy Days and filmed on the set of The Brady Bunch. This week on These Days Are Ours, we talk about that film and our feelings on smoking in general. Please do join us. And don't smoke.

The unsolvable riddle that is 'Monster a Go-Go' (1965)

Herschell Gordon Lewis tried to make something marketable out of an unfinished Bill Rebane film.

An ad for the film.

If I asked you to imagine the movies that typically wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd probably think of those crummy, low-budget science-fiction and horror films made between the 1950s and the 1970s. These were shoddily-produced exploitation flicks that were shipped out to undiscriminating drive-in audiences across America for decades. These quickies were relentlessly hawked through hyperbolic trailers, posters, and radio ads that routinely made promises the actual movies—often slow-moving, static, and talky—could never keep. They featured unconvincing monsters, aliens, spaceships, and mad scientists, and they had attention-grabbing titles, often containing words like "space," "attack," "creature," and "invasion."

As silly as these movies were, there's a kind of innocence or naivete to them. Eventually, as home video supplanted the drive-ins, exploitation movies increased the amount of sex and violence, and the old-school, MST3K-style movies started looking a little quaint in comparison. Today, these movies are mostly seen as curios of a bygone era, beloved by some, despised by a few, and ignored by most.

If you stand way back and squint, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is the very kind of movie I've been describing. It was even used on MST3K in 1993 during the show's fourth season on Comedy Central. In the broadest sense, the film is typical genre fare. The plot goes something like this: an American space capsule has crash-landed in a field in Illinois. On board is astronaut Frank Douglas, but radiation has transformed him into a hideous, eight-foot-tall, Frankenstein-like monster with blisters all over his face. Still wearing his spacesuit, he mindlessly roams the area, occasionally murdering civilians. The military tries to locate Douglas and put a stop to his rampage. Meanwhile, scientists attempt to come up with an antidote for his condition, and Frank's grieving family worries about him. Complicating matters is the fact that Douglas is highly radioactive. It all leads to a tense finale set in the Chicago sewers.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 289: The screenplay for 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951)

"You horrible room!": Angela Stevens as June Drake in Ed Wood's The Sun Was Setting.

Here's a quirk of B-movie history for you. At least three of Ed Wood's unproduced screenplays have been published in book form: The Vampire's Tomb (1954), The Ghoul Goes West (1953-55), and The Frank Leahy Legend (1974). But only two of Eddie's produced scripts have ever been published to my knowledge: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and Bride of the Monster (1955). I'd love to analyze and scrutinize Eddie's screenplays more closely—both the ones that were made and the ones that weren't—but they're just not available to me. I have no idea how people get them.

In the case of Eddie's made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951), I thought I'd take matters into my own hands and recreate the script myself by carefully transcribing the finished film. This is not the first time I've done something like this. Years ago, I painstakingly transcribed Glen or Glenda (1953). But that transcript is still a mess in terms of formatting. Perhaps someday, I will finish it. The Sun Was Setting is more manageable, due to its shorter runtime. In any event, it is my hope that this quasi-script will give us an opportunity to see how Ed Wood constructed a screen story.

NOTE BEFORE WE CONTINUE: This is not in any way, shape, or form the actual screenplay that Ed Wood used when making the movie. It is purely a fan-made work. It is not formatted as a standard Hollywood script would be. Instead, this material is presented in a form that I feel would be more easily readable. If you feel you can do better, you likely can and should. In fact, I invite you to do so. J.B.