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| In Drown the Devil, Angel Scott finds the connection between Ed Wood and religion. |
Neighbors, said the reverend, he couldnt stay out of these here hell, hell, hellholes right here in Nacogdoches. I said to him, said: You goin to take the son of God in there with ye? And he said: Oh no. No I aint. And I said: Dont you know that he said I will foller ye always even unto the end of the road?Well, he said, I aint askin nobody to go nowheres. And I said: Neighbor, you dont need to ask. He’s a goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye dont. I said: Neighbor, you caint get shed of him. Now. Are you going to drag him, him, into that hellhole yonder?-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)
The field of Woodology has now progressed to the point that we are getting books about fairly specific aspects of Ed Wood's life: his military career, his marriage to Kathy Wood, his unproduced screenplays, etc. Of all these, few projects have intrigued me more than Angel Scott's Drown the Devil: A Spiritual Biography of Ed Wood (Bear Manor, 2024). A real-life pastor, Angel has been a vital part of the Ed Wood online fan community for years now, and I knew she was working on a religious-themed book about Wood and his films. Naturally, I was curious to see what she uncovered in her extensive research.
My guess was that this would be another book that used popular culture as a springboard to talk about matters of theology and philosophy. I was thinking specifically of The Tao of Pooh (1982) by Benjamin Hoff, The Gospel According to Peanuts (1965) by Robert L. Short, and the popular anthology The Simpsons and Philosophy (2001). So has Angel Scott written The Tao of Wood or The Gospel According to St. Eddie? Not exactly. While there is some discussion of the religious content in Wood's films, particularly Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), this is not primarily an interpretive or analytical book. For readers seeking something like that, I'd recommend Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009) by Rob Craig.
Instead, this book is exactly what its subtitle proclaims it to be: a spiritual biography. In Drown the Devil, Angel Scott tells the story of Ed Wood's life and career, from his birth in Poughkeepsie, NY in 1924 to his death in Hollywood in 1978. We hit all the expected stops on the tour. Eddie works as a movie usher in his hometown, serves a stint in the Marines during World War II, comes home after the war, heads out to California, makes some infamous horror and sci-fi movies for a few years, and finally descends into pornography before dying penniless at 54. Along the way, he develops a serious, crippling addiction to alcohol and has at least three significant romantic relationships, two of which lead to marriage.
Drown the Devil examines the role that religion played in these events. To put it another way, where is God in the strange, sad story of Edward D. Wood, Jr.? To be honest, it's not a question I'd spent a great deal of time pondering before now. When I think of directors whose films frequently grapple with spiritual matters, my mind goes to Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ingmar Bergman. While Ed Wood's movies are not entirely godless—indeed, Bela Lugosi's character in Glen or Glenda might be a stand-in for the Almighty—I wouldn't exactly say religion was one of the director's main motifs. Ultimately, each one of us has to deal with God in some way, whether it's to follow Him, scorn Him, or deny His very existence. So it does make sense to examine Ed's life and work from a religious standpoint.
As I mentioned earlier, Angel Scott did an admirable amount of research for this book, and some of her most interesting findings occur in the early chapters that deal with Eddie's youth in Poughkeepsie. I really had no idea of his Methodist upbringing or the fact that he served as chaplain for the Poughkeepsie chapter of the Marine Corps League for a year after his military service ended. So Ed Wood was much more grounded in religion than I had previously assumed. I was also very intrigued by an extended comparison of Glen or Glenda to Rowland V. Lee's I Am Suzanne (1933), a now-obscure romantic melodrama about the relationship between a dancer (Lilian Harvey) and a struggling puppeteer (Gene Raymond).
The heart of Drown the Devil, accounting for about a third of the book's total length, is a very detailed telling of the making and distribution of Ed Wood's most famous film, Grave Robbers from Outer Space aka Plan 9 from Outer Space. As Ed's fans know, Plan 9 was partially financed by the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills, and the relationship between the director and the church was not always harmonious. The unlikely story (a Baptist church making a cheap horror film?) has already been told in numerous books and articles and was played largely for laughs in the Tim Burton-directed biopic Ed Wood (1994). One particularly memorable scene has Eddie and several members of his oddball entourage being baptized in a swimming pool. In the published version of the Ed Wood screenplay, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski talk about how they handled this aspect of the plot:
We had to turn Plan 9 from Outer Space into a climax. After much thought, the solution hit us, simple and elegant. The bad guys would become the Baptist moneymen, who want nothing more than a coherent film. All they are asking for is what any rational person would: continuity and logic. It is irony on top of irony. In the world of Ed, this impudence makes them villains. How dare they compromise him!
So it seems that the biopic was more interested in telling an entertaining, sympathetic story than in being strictly truthful to history. Fair enough. I don't fault the screenwriters for that.
For this book, Angel Scott has combed through the archives, including some decades-old church newsletters, to discover the truth of the Plan 9/First Baptist saga. It turns out that the story is more nuanced and complicated than I had previously suspected. Yes, Eddie got into contact with the Baptist church through his then-landlord, J. Edward Reynolds, who was a member of the congregation. And, yes, Ed joined the congregation himself in order to curry favor with the church's leadership. But Scott's book reveals that Ed Wood was not the opportunistic carpetbagger you might assume him to be. He attended services at First Baptist for two years and even penned a pageant for the organization, though no scripts have survived. Meanwhile, the infamous baptism of Wood's coterie had a surprisingly long-lasting effect on some of them. And J. Edward Reynolds, essentially a comic character in Ed Wood, emerges from Drown the Devil as a tragic figure with some of the same demons that ultimately claimed Eddie himself.
After directing The Sinister Urge (1960), his last ostensibly "normal" film, Ed Wood spent most of the rest of his life working prodigiously in the adult entertainment industry. He penned dozens of pornographic novels and wrote many short stories and articles for nudie magazines. He also worked on both hardcore and softcore films as a writer, director, and occasional actor. Ed's "porno" work constitutes a major part of his canon, perhaps even the majority of it. So what do we do with all this as we try to make sense of Eddie's life? Some books and documentaries about Wood either marginalize or ignore this material, while others revel in it. Scott takes a moderate stance, giving Ed's adult work ample space in the manuscript without wallowing in the truly unpleasant details. She acknowledges the reality of Eddie's career prospects in the 1960s and '70s while leaving him with at least a modicum of dignity.
As I made my way through Drown the Devil, naturally I reflected on my own complicated history with religion. I was raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family and attended weekly masses until I was in my late twenties. My faith was greatly shaken by my mother's death when I was in high school, but I continued to go through the motions of being a Catholic for roughly another decade after she passed away. As of 2012, I was calling myself an atheist, even though I never actually stopped praying. Today, I honestly don't know where I stand. There are days when God seems impossible to deny and others when He seems impossible to believe. I can't say that Ed Wood's movies have shed a great deal of light on the matter for me, but Angel Scott has certainly given me some new questions to ponder as I screen Plan 9 for the umpteenth time.
