Ed Wood Wednesdays: A look at Ed Wood's 'A Study of Fetishes & Fantasies' (1973) (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

Ed Wood gets kinky in this rarely-read 1973 book.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. and Norman Bates, 1973, A Study of Fetishes & Fantasies, Edusex Press ED 113, Los Angeles, CA: Gallery Press, Inc., 191 pp.

In 1973, the wisdom contained in this book commanded the princely sum of $3.95 ($27.98 today). By comparison, a gallon of regular gas was 40 cents, a copy of Playboy magazine was a $1.00, a gallon of milk was $1.31, and a first-class postage stamp would set you back eight cents. Careful editing has never been a hallmark of the adult publishing industry. So it is not surprising that the interior title page bears a slightly different title (A Study in Fetishes and Fantasies) and different author names (Norman Bates and Dick Trent) than shown on the covers. The introduction is also credited to Dick Trent and Norman Bates. As Ed's fans know, Dick Trent was one of Eddie's most commonly-used pseudonyms. Norman Bates, meanwhile, was fellow wage-slave writer Charles D. Anderson. 

An eye-catching front cover.

The book's most noticeable feature (and primary selling point) is its numerous pornographic photos. As one latter-day observer put it: "The photos are quite graphic, very 1970s, and are as easy on the sensitive eye as a papercut across the eyeball might be." Eighty-three black-and-white photos are arranged so that almost every two-page spread throughout the book consists of a page of text on the left and a captioned full-page photo on the right. Two eight-page full color photo inserts are also included, one near the front and one near the back of the book. 

The photos' subject matter is overwhelmingly heterosexual, including a selection of interracial couplings. There are a limited number of photos of lesbianism but – uncharacteristically for Gallery Press at this time – no photos of male homosexual acts. Three of the photos depict a man and woman having sex in a casket and are seemingly taken from the final sex scene in Eddie’s movie Necromania (1971). But the photos represent angles and depict actions, e.g., Maria Arnold on top of Ric Lutze during intercourse, not shown in the film itself. The photo captions throughout the book have that slightly odd ring to them that was the Gallery Press house style.

As is usual for an adult "sex study" from this era, a large portion of the book consists of extended quotes taken from other publications. The bibliography is entirely composed of medical and sociological textbooks or citations to mainstream news articles. Nothing is referenced from the contemporaneous sleaze literature. These borrowed portions are held together with the authors' paraphrasing and riffing on ideas drawn from the same sources or their fertile imaginations. There are sections throughout Fetishes & Fantasies that have Eddie's stylistic fingerprints all over them as seen in the excerpts which follow.