Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 265: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (1994) references this production of The Casual Company.

When Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) relocated to Hollywood from his native Poughkeepsie in the late 1940s after his stint in the Marines, his goal was to break into the movie business. The silver screen had fascinated him as a boy, so once he became a man, he took Horace Greeley's famous advice: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Once settled in California, instead of relying on job offers from the major studios (Universal, Fox, Paramount), Ed Wood attempted to produce and/or direct his own low-budget movies. This was a youngster with initiative. A dreamer, you might say.

A young Ed Wood.

Unfortunately, Eddie's earliest Hollywood projects, like the crude Westerns Range Revenge and Crossroads of Laredo (both 1948), were never truly completed during the filmmaker's lifetime and were only released posthumously. I've pinpointed the made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951) as the first production Eddie actually saw all the way through to completion, though I can find no record of it airing anywhere. Ed's attempts at making television commercials "on spec" and then selling them to clients likewise proved futile. You can still watch some of Eddie's self-made TV commercials today, but I don't think any companies ever used them.

What's most remarkable about Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood is how many short-lived production companies he managed to start and how many backers he managed to sweettalk into giving him money, despite having no proven track record of success. Eddie's graveyard of failed ventures includes: Wood-Thomas Productions, Story Ad Films, W.D.C.B. Films, Atomic Productions, and more.

Meanwhile, to earn a little money and (potentially) get his name out there, Eddie did a little theater work during those early years in Hollywood. The great James Pontolillo covers this topic extensively in his book, The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1946-1948 (2025). Besides acting in The Blackguard Returns, Eddie managed to stage a farce he'd written himself called The Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. This lighthearted office comedy, based on Ed's own military experience, had a brief run at the Village Playhouse in late 1948. In the October 26, 1948 edition of The Valley Times, critic Henry Arntsen described it as a "three-acter" revolving around "a group of pencil-pushing Marines at a Naval hospital." 

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Apprenticeship Odyssey, Part 2 by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood (top row, center) looks serious as he poses with his Casual Company cast.

"I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it's like a circus in my head." 

-Steven Wright

Perhaps I've been unfair. Perhaps Casual Company, the comedic military play that Ed Wood co-wrote in 1945 with Harry J. Kone (and later novelized solo), is not merely juvenilia. Undoubtedly, after Eddie left Poughkeepsie for good in 1946, Casual Company was something of a calling card for him when he arrived in Hollywood. By then, it had been staged many times by Ed Wood and others, albeit on military bases or with military sponsorship. After the war, Ed even managed to stage it at Poughkeepsie High School, even though he'd dropped out to enlist at the tail end of his junior year in the spring of 1942.

Just how often and where Casual Company played is hard to say, but thanks to an enthusiastic reader who shared a passel of articles with me that I had never seen, I now have more information suggesting just how foundational Casual Company was to Ed's storming of Hollywood. Those articles led me to find a few others, nearly all of them from the Valley Times of North Hollywood.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 101: "Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines" (1948)

The Marines in Casual Company seem more interested in chasing babes than defending their country.

Did Ed Wood write for Street & Smith?

In the late 1940s, Ed Wood seemingly had no idea where his career was heading. Was it to be in theater? Movies? Television? Writing novels? He didn't know, so he tried all of those things without finding great success in any of them. The popular image of Ed is of the lifelong film fanatic who spent most of his childhood at the local cinema in Poughkeepsie, watching Westerns and Bela Lugosi pictures, and whose life was forever changed by the gift of a home movie camera from his father. There's a lot of truth in that. Movies were a long-time obsession for Ed Wood, and he stayed in the motion picture business as long as he could.

But Eddie seemingly had literary aspirations from an early age, too. In a 1978 interview with Fred Olen Ray, Ed claimed to have sold a story called The Sunset Murders to the New York publishing company Street & Smith, known for dime novels and pulp fiction, when he was only 12. In April 1946, on the precipice of his honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps, Ed Wood told his hometown paper, The Poughkeepsie Journal, that he was in the process of turning one of his unfinished plays, The Inconvenient Corpse, into a novel. He was fond enough of Corpse to mention it in his mid-1960s showbiz primer Hollywood Rat Race. 

Neither The Sunset Murders nor The Inconvenient Corpse has ever surfaced, and Eddie's prolific career as a published novelist didn't really begin until 1963's Killer in Drag (aka Black Lace Drag). One early Wood manuscript that did somehow survive, however, is 1948's Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. Seemingly based on a comedic play Ed wrote while he was still in the Marines, the novel was unpublished during his lifetime and was finally serialized in Cult Movies magazine in 1993 and 1994 in anticipation of Tim Burton's Ed Wood biopic.

Best described as a novella, Casual Company turns out to be a slight, slim book in which virtually nothing of consequence happens. It's an episodic work detailing the day-to-day lives of Marines in the somewhat drowsy days following World War II. The setting is the Casual Company office at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Beaumont, California. In military terminology, a "casual company" is defined as a holding unit for Marines awaiting discharge from the Corps, special training, or deployment to a unit. In other words, this is purgatory. The action -- or, more accurately, inaction -- of the book revolves around the five men who work in this stuffy office as they banter, argue, and play mild pranks on one another. How mild are the pranks? Their idea of a laugh riot is removing the aces from a deck of cards while one guy is out of the room, preventing him from winning at solitaire.

Since no scripts of the Casual Company play have yet emerged, and since newspaper accounts of the era don't describe the plot or characters in detail, it's difficult to say how closely the novel follows the theatrical version of this material. All we really have to go on are the vintage programs from various Casual Company performances. According to one such document, the characters in the play are: 1st Sgt. I.M.A. Hashmark, Capt. J. Sleepingwell Gutter, PFC Lemmey A. Dime, PFC Elbo Joints, PFC Jim Nastics, Maxine Anthony, PFC Greenberg, Private Pogybate, Corporal Anthony (this was a role Eddie played himself), Lieutenant Muscles, Ilene Sideways, Mary Widow, and WAVE Lois Slowly.

For the novel, Eddie toned down the silly, pun-filled names, but most of the characters listed above have obvious counterparts in the literary version of Casual Company. 1st Sgt. I.M.A. Hashmark, for instance, becomes First Sergeant Daniel "Hashmark" O'Hare, aka Top, an ill-tempered hothead who bellows orders at his underlings in the office but can be easily kowtowed by his wife. Top is also a habitual nose-picker, a habit Ed Wood mentions frequently. I kept imagining him as Sgt. Carter (Frank Sutton) of Gomer Pyle, USMC.

Frank Sutton as Sgt. Carter on Gomer Pyle, USMC.

Corporal Anthony, meanwhile, becomes Captain Robert Roberts, a do-nothing commanding officer who is far more concerned with hunting rabbits than in doing anything useful at the office. The captain, who has never once hit an actual rabbit, frequently goes on hunting expeditions in "the underbrush of the mountainous area behind the hospital zone." Accompanying him on these hopeless excursions is comely Lieutenant "Muscles" Morgan, so named because she's the "female athletic officer of the base." The lieutenant is running out of patience with the addle-brained captain, but he somehow sweet talks her into sticking around a little longer. Both Top and Roberts are staunch traditionalists, wary of any changes to the Corps.

In the novel, Roberts and Top are in charge of three wisecracking, duty-shirking reservists: PFC Jerome "Jerry" Carter, PFC Paul "Elbo" Bender, and Staff Sgt. Jim Armstrong. These men spend most of their time in the office reading mystery novels, napping, and talking about dames. Their main goal in life, other than taking long lunches, seems to be enraging the temperamental Top. They delight in second-guessing his orders and undermining his (minimal) authority. Occasionally, he gets revenge by making them stand at attention while listening to a recording of "The Marines' Hymn." It looks like, in the play, these three characters had slightly different names and were all PFCs, while in the book, one is a staff sergeant and occasionally pulls rank on the other two.

The most interesting passages in Casual Company occur when outsiders come into the office and disrupt the stultifying routine. In one such vignette, a sexy woman named Maxine Anderson asks Top if her husband, Corporal Anthony, can have more liberty. Top tells her he'll see what he can do. When the bemused corporal finally arrives at the office, he does so at the exact moment the three jokers, Jerry, Jim, and Elbo, are staging a farcical mini-mutiny against Top. The disgruntled first sergeant, eager to regain control, tells the corporal he can have plenty of extra liberty... since he's now been demoted to PFC. Because the Anthonys are both listed in the theatrical cast of characters, my guess is that this incident in the novel is taken directly from the play.

The Swedish humor of Yogi Yorgesson.

One of the oddest vignettes in Casual Company revolves around a stereotypical Swede named Yorgenson, who has deliberately scuffed up his pants in hopes of procuring new ones. Jerry, Jim, and Elbo take delight in sending Yorgenson from one desk to another and asking him ridiculous questions that have nothing to do with his request. Eventually, the Swede, who speaks with a comically thick accent a la 1940s comedian Yogi Yorgesson, emerges triumphant. I cannot see any obvious cognate of Yorgenson in the play, but it's possible that this character was drastically renamed.

In case you were wondering about Ilene Sideways, yes, she's in the novel, too. Here, however, her name is simply Ilene. She's described as a pretty young lady who works in the Ships Services, apparently some kind of commissary. She thinks Elbo is "wonderful," much to the annoyance of Top. What makes Ilene especially interesting is that she favors pink angora sweaters. "It was so soft and cuddly," she enthuses about a recent purchase, "and with this beautiful soft pink cover, it is all so feminine." Ed may have based Jerry, Jim, and Elbo on himself and his Marine pals, but Ilene may be his true avatar in this novel.

If there's any drama in Casual Company, it revolves around Jim, who is at the center of a love triangle.  He has a girl back home named Joan and a girl in town named Nadine. Taunted by his fellow Marines, Jim says that Joan and Nadine live thousands of miles apart and will never meet. And, besides, Nadine knows all about Joan. But Joan's letters to Jim remain unanswered, as if he doesn't know what to tell her. When Nadine and Jim are alone, she tells him she loves him, but he's not ready to say those words back to her. This is as close to serious as the novel gets, but the love triangle subplot is never resolved.

Overall, Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines is a remarkably tame and unadventurous outing for Ed Wood. The tone is closer to Mort Walker's long-running military comic strip Beetle Bailey than it is to any of Eddie's later, wilder movies and stories. When Cult Movies divided this novel into four sections, it billed the final installment as "the exciting, thrill-packed conclusion of Casual Company," but the book's final chapters are just as laid-back as the ones that had preceded them. Other than the description of Ilene's angora sweater, the only time we get a glimpse of the future Ed Wood is when he describes an erotic encounter between Jim and Nadine:

Nadine caught his smile with hers the pressed his head to hers and their lips met. Jim started to slide around her waist again, but Nadine ushered his hand upwards, upwards to encircle her round, firm breasts which were heaving against the loose, white, off the shoulder blouse.

Pausing in the middle of a love scene to describe what the heroine is wearing? That's Ed Wood.

P.S. I've said it before, but the play called The Casual Company glimpsed in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) bears no resemblance to this material whatsoever. The only minor connection is that both are military-themed and set in the '40s. The play-within-a-biopic was written by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander and not based on the original Casual Company at all. Scott and Larry's play is an earnest (if ridiculous) drama and actually takes place during World War II in the thick of battle. Ed's Casual Company is a light comedy that takes place in America after the war.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Poughkeepsie Odyssey, Part 7 by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood returned to his hometown after the war with a play tucked under his arm.

Exactly who was Major J.C. Foxworthy, USMCR (Ret.) and how did he become partners in the movie business with fellow ex-Marine Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the late 1950s? In last week's article, Joe Blevins discussed the working relationship between Wood and Foxworthy, revealing a passel of previously unknown details about the latter. As there noted, the pair co-scripted an unrealized film to be titled Trial by Terror, and Foxworthy was credited as Executive Producer on Wood's supremely weird 1959 feature Night of the Ghouls. As to how the two gentlemen connected, Joe opined: "My guess is that Wood and Foxworthy bonded over their shared Marine past, with Eddie no doubt greatly embellishing his own, modest war record."

In fact, the two men's creative partnership stretched back well over a decade, when Eddie was still serving in the military and Foxworthy was only a Captain. An August 18, 1946 article in the Poughkeepsie Journal indicates that Foxworthy played the role of a Captain in Eddie's military-themed stage play Casual Company, described as a "farce in three acts." A surviving program from that time indicates that Foxworthy's character was called Captain J. Sleepingwell Gutter and that he and the other thespians were known collectively as The Sad Sacks. The program also indicates that Eddie co-wrote the play with one Harry J. Kone.

A Casual Company program with Foxworthy's name in the cast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 59: 'Cult Movies' No. 11 (1994) [part 2 of 2]

In 1994, a mere $4.95 (or $6.95 in Canada) would buy you the latest ish of Cult Movies magazine.

"I was classed as a madman, a charlatan, outlawed in a world of science which previously honored me as a genius. Now here in this forsaken jungle hell I have proven that I am alright. No, Professor Strowski, it is no laughing matter."
-Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster (1955)

Eddie's image was upgraded from this to this in the 1990s.

Ed Wood's ironic postmortem fame arrived in at least three distinct waves, as I see it. In other words, there have been three  separate and identifiable eras during which the name of Edward D. Wood, Jr. has possessed some pop cultural clout. For the last few decades, Ed's name always meant something to people, but exactly what it meant depended on the tenor of the times.

Wood's first wave of after-death notoriety occurred in the early-to-mid-1980s, spurred by the publication of Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards. Only the rudiments of Eddie's life and work were widely known to critics and historians at the time, so the first wave was marked by breezy mockery of the man and his career. Wood was merely a cross-dressing clown who made cheap and incredibly amateurish flying saucer flicks. He was a punchline, nothing more.

For many, this is still the predominant image of Ed Wood, thirty-plus years later, so we can safely say that the first wave of Ed's postmortem fame was the most influential and durable of the three. During this wave, Eddie's three most famous films -- Glen or Glenda?, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Bride of the Monster, all from the 1950s -- were staples at revival houses and campus theaters, where they were loudly and joyously jeered by hip audiences.

The second wave happened in the early-to-mid-1990s and was centered around Tim Burton's Ed Wood and its literary progenitor, Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy. It was, in a way, a response to the first wave. Second wavers sought to rehabilitate Eddie's image, while still snickering at his life's work. Much more information about Ed Wood's life was known by then, including his debilitating alcoholism, his war record, his prolific career in pornography, and his tragic and poverty-stricken final years.

Appropriately, Eddie was treated with more sympathy and understanding by second wavers, though he remained a figure of fun to them. Wood was still a clown, but now he was a tragic clown; he'd been upgraded from Bozo to Pagliacci, so to speak. Besides Burton's film and Grey's book, the second wave was notable for the appearance of several loving yet cheeky and irreverent documentaries (typified by Ted Newsom's Look Back in Angora) that sought to put Wood's cinematic lunacy into some kind of understandable context while still having some guffaws at his expense.

Part of the third wave.

Third-wave Woodology (and, yes, I am hijacking this term from "third-wave feminism") is occurring right now, in the new millennium, and has no particular catalyst or obvious rallying cry behind it. If anything, it has been made possible by advancements in technology, including search engines and social media. These online breakthroughs have made it much easier for writers and researchers to access and disseminate information as well as stay in contact with other like-minded fans.

What, exactly, made me decide to write a series of articles about this man, a series that has now grown to something like half a million words? Why him? Why now? I don't know exactly, but there must have been something in the air, because the Wood cult -- which had been largely dormant since the Clinton years -- began to rise from its slumbers in the 21st century with crucial new books (Ed Wood, Mad Genius; Blood Splatters Quickly), DVD reissues (Big Box of Wood; Ed Wood's Dirty Movies), and special events (the gallery exhibition of his paperbacks; a week-long New York film festival). Private Edward D. Wood, Jr. had been officially called back into service.

Hopefully, the third wave of Wood's fame will be the one that finally "gets it right" by painting the most complete and honest portrait yet of this surprisingly complex man. Learning from the first and second waves (without letting our thinking be dictated by them), we third wavers can now use all the information at hand to accurately and evenhandedly assess Eddie's strengths and weaknesses, and we can identify what is still unique and fascinating about Ed's work, while not losing sight of Ed's shortcomings. Perhaps in this sense, time has been a gift to us. As Ed Wood's life recedes further and further into the past, the man himself can get the fair day in court he has been denied for decades.

But now, readers, it is time to revisit an artifact from the second wave of Woodology, specifically a fan magazine produced in 1994, right before the premiere of Disney-Touchstone's Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp and Martin Landau. A multi-million-dollar, star-studded, studio-financed biopic is the kind of honor normally reserved for those we call "heroes": chart-topping singers, record-breaking athletes, paradigm-shifting science whizzes. For such a biopic to be made about a so-called B-movie director whose films were neither critically nor financially successful in his own time was astonishingly, absurdly rare. And the fan community certainly took notice. Twenty-one years ago, when the now-mighty internet was still a mere fledgling, fans of the bizarre and the overlooked expressed themselves not on the screen but on the page.

(NOTE: In case you missed it, the first part of my Cult Movies coverage is right here.) 

Cult Movies magazine, No. 11 (1994):

A continuing examination

"Valda Hansen: Farewell to the White Ghost" (pgs. 54-55)

Valda Hansen in Night of the Ghouls.

Actress Valda Hansen (1932-1993) was the blonde bombshell who vampily portrayed the con artist known as the White Ghost in Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls in 1959. After years removed from the public spotlight, Valda briefly resurfaced in the 1990s to reminisce fondly about Eddie in Nightmare of Ecstasy and the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood. She died of cancer at the age of 60 in July 1993, a year before this issue was released. Her death, in fact, had already merited mention in Cult Movies #8. "Farewell to the White Ghost" is a fond goodbye to the departed starlet, written by Cult Movies publisher Buddy Barnett, based on an interview with Hansen by Cult Movies editor-in-chief Mike Copner.

Valda Hansen is one of those intriguing peripheral figures in the Wood story, a very sexy actress who might have been a big star had she gotten a few lucky breaks. Drew Friedman was sufficiently interested in Hansen to devote one of his Ed Wood trading cards to her. "Farewell to the White Ghost" helps to flesh her out a little more. Ed first discovered Valda when she was a teenage stage actress. It was he who suggested she peroxide her naturally-tawny hair in order to look older.

Personally, I think it's noteworthy that Eddie's other great loves, Dolores Fuller and Kathy Wood, were also blondes. Hansen's promising '50s career as a studio contract player, unfortunately, was derailed by her scandalous romance with George White, a film editor many years her senior. After White's death, Hansen left showbiz for other pursuits. It was a "torrid affair" with B-movie mainstay Tony Cardoza, himself a supporting player in Night of the Ghouls, which brought her back to motion pictures in the 1970s with such credits as Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman! (1975). She speaks with kindness and generosity about both Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi, though she does relate the canard that Lugosi drank formaldehyde. (This is an urban myth that wound up in the Ed Wood screenplay.)

Of Ed Wood, who clearly had a crush on her, Valda says:

Ed was very metaphysical.  I don't care about all this stuff about him being the world's worst director, who cares, but he was a very metaphysical person. He used to call me late into the night, he always called me lover. He'd say, "Lover, only you understand what I'm going through tonight, only you. My soul is in torment. Do you understand, lover?" He was always a little drunk at the time. But, I understood him. He used to talk about death and his feelings about death. He used to reminisce about Bela Lugosi and missed opportunities of [Ed's] career. But, he was very metaphysical and believed strongly in life after death. I believe he's still with us, I've sensed his presence many times.

An actor: Bela Lugosi.

"The Road to Las Vegas: Bela Lugosi in American Theatre" (pgs. 56-65)

Bela Lugosi may have spent much of his career in a coffin, but the man was definitely born in a trunk, to use a hoary old showbiz expression. This eye-opening historical/critical article by author Frank J. Dello Stritto is easily the lengthiest, most complex, and best-researched piece in all of Cult Movies #11. It's an incredible work of pop cultural scholarship, one that covers over three decades of Lugosi's life in fairly minute detail and offers great insight into a misunderstood figure.

Dello Stritto painstakingly analyzes Lugosi's theatrical career one show at a time, starting with The Red Poppy, which lasted a mere ten days in Greenwich Village in December 1922, and ending with Devil's Paradise, a Los Angeles production that ran for two days in June 1956, only two months before Lugosi's death.

In between these two flops, Bela appeared everywhere from Broadway to summer stock and saw his career ebb and flow like the tide. Dracula was the actor's most famous role, and he played it many times in many venues of varying respectability, including a 1927-1928 Broadway run that Dello Stritto suggests may not have been a runaway success.

This, however, was merely one facet of the actor's surprisingly diverse, genre-hopping career. By methodically following Lugosi from show to show, the author traces the Hungarian emigre's crazily up-and-down life in the States, including the rise and fall of his 20-year marriage to Lillian Lugosi.

There were triumphs along the way, as in 1943, when a 60-year-old Lugosi successfully took over for professional rival Boris Karloff in Arsenic and Old Lace and made the role his own. But there were humiliations, too, as in the poverty row "fright night" shows Lugosi consented to do in the early 1950s. Critics were by turns amused, bemused, impressed, and distressed by Bela Lugosi, who never shook his Hungarian accent and who had to resort to some degree of phonetic memorization of his lines, especially in the early days.

I don't know if Dello Stritto realized this Lugosi-centric piece would end up in an issue ostensibly devoted to Edward D. Wood, Jr., but Eddie is a memorable supporting character in "The Road to Las Vegas." In fact, the author goes as far as making this bold statement, which I will quote verbatim:

"Edward D. Wood, Jr. -- sometimes sports promoter, sometime manufacturer of 3-D Christmas cards, director, producer and writer of unforgettably bad films, and now a cult figure in his own right -- is the pivotal figure in Lugosi's last years. Questionable as his cinematic talents may have been, he did succeed in getting Lugosi work when no one else either could or would." 

Dello Stritto says that Wood was "the guiding hand" in Lugosi's "moving" and "much-needed" public appearance in San Bernadino, CA on New Year's Eve, 1953, during which the actor made a heartfelt, impromptu speech to his assembled fans. The article divides Lugosi's life into different eras, and Dello Stritto identifies the late 1940s and early 1950s as a time of "Lugosimania," when the actor's presence alone created "spontaneous mass hysteria." This, says the author, was the period when Lugosi met and began working with "a new generation of young filmmakers," including Eddie.

Comedian Sparky Kaye's grave.

For Wood fans, the main point of interest in "The Road to Las Vegas" is the section dealing specifically with The Bela Lugosi Revue, a comedic Vegas stage show allegedly written by Ed Wood and performed over the course of two months in the winter of 1954 at a venue called The Silver Slipper. Ever the trouper, the aging Hungarian thespian pushed himself to do three shows a day in Vegas for seven consecutive weeks.

Meanwhile, Wood and his then-partner Alex Gordon tried to drum up more work for Bela: perhaps a radio show or comic book and certainly more film roles. Lugosi made it through the grueling run of the Dracula-spoofing revue like a champ, but the hoped-for job offers did not materialize. Bela's only film work after that was Wood and Gordon's own production, Bride of the Monster.

Dello Stritto helpfully includes, as a sidebar, Variety's entire (positive) assessment of The Bela Lugosi Revue, dated March 1, 1954. From this, we get a much clearer view of what the show must have been like. Though Lugosi was obviously the star attraction, the hour-long show featured a cast of skilled comedians, including Sparky Kaye and Hank Henry, as well as the talents of stripper Terre Sheehan, who "emerges from a large champagne glass of bubbles" at one point in the proceedings. The Bela Lugosi Revue also included a parody of Jack Webb's Dragnet, which is interesting to learn because I've often stated that Dragnet was a huge influence on Ed Wood's movies. Variety even praises Bela Lugosi's ad libbing skills, disproving a line Martin Landau says in Ed Wood as Lugosi: "I never said I could ad lib!" According to Variety, he could.

"Rudolph Grey on Ed Wood" (pgs. 74-77)

Rudolph Grey and Frank Henenlotter

One of the true highlights of Cult Movies #11 is this spirited conversation between Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cult filmmaker Frank Henenlotter, the man behind such demented horror comedies as Basket Case and Frankenhooker. What fuels the discussion is the fact that both men are unabashed Ed Wood fans who are quite familiar with the most obscure titles in Wood's patchwork filmography. As such, they largely forego talking about such obvious titles as Glenda and Plan 9 and instead dive headfirst into the deep end of the cinematic swimming pool, to coin a phrase.

Besides the Tim Burton film, the big news in Wood-land at the time of this issue was the recent discovery of a semi-complete print of Ed Wood's Necromania, a pornographic feature from 1971. Grey said he had offered a $20,000 reward for the movie, but Henenlotter relates the story of how Necromania really materialized. As it happened, Rudy's book, Nightmare of Ecstasy, was crucial to the film's identification. Henenlotter:

[The film] turned up quite casually. Some guy wanted to sell [Something Weird Video founder] Mike Vraney a bunch of 16mm sex films. Well, Mike didn't want any hard-core so he asked the guy for a list and was trying to weed out the hard-core from the soft. But since there really isn't any reference work for hard-core titles, Mike called me up saying, "Have you heard of any of these?" And we're just racing through the list going, "nope, nope, nope" and then, boom, he says Necromania. And we both just said, "No. Can't be. No way. Better get it!" So he gets the film, puts it on, sees that the head title is missing and calls me up in a panic. "There are no credits! How do I know if it's Necromania?" I say, "Is Rene Bond in it?" He says, "I don't know who she is." I say, "Is Rick Lutze in it?" He says, "I don't know who he is." So I say, "Get Rudolph's book and turn to page 134. There is a picture of Ed Wood on the set." He does and goes nuts, "We got it! We got it!"

The discovery of Necromania seems to have bolstered Grey's spirits. He admits to Henenlotter that his fruitless, decade-long search for the Gothic stag film had depressed him. But the mid-1990s were boom times in the Ed Wood biz, as evidenced by Something Weird's VHS releases of Wood's work, the warm reception of Nightmare of Ecstasy, and the prospect of a Disney-financed Wood biopic. As such, the normally-cagey Grey, whom I've previously described as a cross between Lt. Columbo and Bob Dylan, is unusually effusive, even bubbly.

Since Nightmare is written as an oral history and is built from quotes by Ed Wood's friends and associates, the book doesn't really offer Grey the opportunity to opine about his chosen subject. Here, then, Grey finally gets the chance to speak his mind about Ed Wood's life and work, particularly his late-career, adult-oriented films from the 1960s and 1970s. Some highlights:

• Rudolph Grey's Ed Wood project began life as a fictional screenplay about a filmmaker who turns to pornography. This was to have been dedicated to Ed Wood.

• At the time of this article, Grey was still trying to track down two other Wood-directed films from the same era (June 1971) as Necromania. These are The Young Marrieds and The Only House in Town. [Note: both have since been located.] According to Grey, Young Marrieds and Only House were both produced by a company called Caballero Films at a cost of $5000 apiece and then sold to Stacey Films for distribution. Caballero, Grey says, was "affiliated with Bernie Bloom, Ed Wood's publisher." This jibes with my theory about those films as well, so I was glad to read this.

• Rudolph Grey reads several long excerpts from Ed Wood's novel The Only House, the book upon which (confusingly enough) Necromania  is based. The text is very similar to "Come Inn," a short story I have previously reviewed. The character names (Tania, Madame Heles, Danny, Shirley) are the same in the film, the novel, and the short story.

Ed-sploitation?

• Grey and Henenlotter candidly discuss Ed Wood's appearances in the films of Joe Robertson, namely Love Feast and Mrs. Stone's Thing. Eddie appears in drag and intoxicated in these late-1960s productions. In the former, says Grey, Wood is wearing "the kind of underwear my grandmother used to wear." Both Frank and Rudy say that these movies are fascinating finds but ultimately depressing because Ed doesn't look well in them. "It's almost as if he's being exploited," says Grey.

• One Million AC/DC is brought up, then summarily dismissed. Frank Henenlotter calls it "just a lot of stupid jokes abut grapes and an obvious children's toy they're using as a dinosaur."

• Henenlotter also comments on the indelible theme song from For Love and Money: "so ghastly you just can't get it out of your head."

• As the two men survey the films Ed wrote for director Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s, Grey remarks that Fugitive Girls has "an Ed Wood script that seems complete and hasn't been tampered with too much." Other SCA films of the era are also critiqued (The Class Reunion, Drop Out Wife, Snow Bunnies, Beach Bunnies, The Cocktail Hostesses), mostly disparagingly. Apostolof, they both feel, exerted too strong a hand in editing Eddie's screenplays, so Ed's voice can barely be heard in the finished films, apart from a few stray lines. 

• Grey explains his own qualifications for being able to identify genuine Ed Wood-written dialogue. He finds it especially odd that Eddie listed Hot Ice on his writing resume, since he doesn't detect any trace of Wood in the script. (In my Hot Ice review, I found some potentially Wood-ian elements.)

• Both Frank Henenlotter and Rudolph Grey are much happier with the throwback science-fiction film, The Venus Flytrap (erroneously marketed as The Revenge of Dr. X). Grey enthuses that the film exhibits a "crazy logic" which is "definitely Ed Wood." Henenlotter and Grey are both particularly smitten with the lead performance of James Craig as a cantankerous mad scientist.

• The conversation turns next to John Andrews, a crucial Wood associate who died shortly before the publication of Nightmare of Ecstasy. Grey says that Andrews provided many of the best anecdotes in the book and claims that Nightmare "would have been much less than it was" without John's contributions. Apparently, Forrest J. Ackerman had written an article in Cult Movies disparaging the late Mr. Andrews and accusing him of thievery. Rudolph Grey, in response, calls Ackerman's story "cheap and shoddy."

• The article ends with a thoughtful Rudoph Grey discussing his overall impressions of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the man he has spent decades studying. Ed, he says, was an "unconventional" man with "a vast store of experience," including fighting in the Second World War and traveling with a carnival as a half-man, half-woman. So why didn't Eddie succeed in this world? "Nobody took him seriously," Grey laments. "No one recognized that Ed had something to offer."

"Casual Company - Part 2" (pgs. 78-79)

Ed's wartime play.

This particular article was the main reason I decided to buy Cult Movies #11 in the first place, and it turned out to be my main source of frustration with the issue as well. Just to refresh your memory: Casual Company was Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s first-ever novel, which he wrote in 1948 at the age of 24, and it was based on his experiences in the Marines during World War II.

Although unpublished during Wood's lifetime, Casual Company served as the basis for a play that actually was produced at a small theater in Los Angeles in 1948, with Ed both directing and playing the role of "Corporal Anthony." I'm not sure how the manuscript for the ultra-obscure novel survived for half a century, but a copy of it somehow wound up in the possession of the editors of Cult Movies magazine.

For some crazy reason, I had the impression that the entirety of the novel was included in Cult Movies #11. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, Cult Movies chose to serialize the novel, and the magazine's eleventh issue merely contained the second installment of that series: two densely-packed, eye-straining pages of text, presented in what looks like a six-point font and divided into three columns per page.

This layout, coupled with the cheap quality of the paper, makes the experience of reading the article more like that of browsing through a telephone directory in search of an honest-looking plumber. According to The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr., the first excerpt from Casual Company appeared in the magazine's tenth issue in June 1993. I do not know if any further installments appeared in the magazine. Perhaps some collectors can enlighten me on this topic.

I was doubly disappointed here: first to realize that the entirety of the novel was not included in this issue of the magazine and then to find out that I wouldn't even be reading the beginning of the novel but would be joining the story already in progress. (On the letters page, a Cult Movies reader even says that the idea of serializing the novel in this fashion is impractical. I definitely agree.) But since I had already purchased Cult Movies #11 and was still very interested in Casual Company, I read "Part 2" anyway and decided to glean what I could from it.

Tim Burton's Ed Wood, with a screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, memorably depicts the Casual Company play as being a very earnest and preachy affair set on a grim-looking battlefield. This is understandable, since Eddie claimed to have seen combat in WW2 and even claimed to have survived torture at the hands of the Japanese. But Eddie was also a whiz-bang clerical worker, famed for his typing skills. And when a program for Casual Company recently resurfaced in the infamous Ed Wood auction of 2015, the play was described as "a farce in three acts" and had lots of jokey, pun-filled character names in its cast list.

True to form, this excerpt from the Casual Company novel reveals itself as a very mild office comedy with no combat action whatsoever and barely any conflict at all. It could easily be a episode of Gomer Pyle, USMC or Major Dad, but it's like one of those shows on Quaaludes.

Think Gomer Pyle, USMC on heavy sedatives.

The story -- at least the section of it I read -- is not set in the European or Pacific Theaters at all. Instead, Casual Company takes place stateside, on a Marine base eighty miles outside of Los Angeles. The activity centers around the office of Casual Company, an outfit that exists to process the medical records of hospitalized Marines. A fleeting reference to Marines becoming "wheel chair cases" is the only hint that there are young men being injured and killed abroad.

Instead, the focus of Casual Company is on three happy-go-lucky reservists, Elbo, Jim, and Jerry, who have been pressed into service as file clerks. Their lackadaisical attitude towards their work is what gives the Casual Company its name, and the three men are constantly at odds with their commanding officers: dimwitted Captain Roberts, a would-be rabbit hunter who can't seem to hit anything, and the cantankerous First Sergeant Daniel "Hashmark" O'Hare, who is also known as Top. (It took me several readings to figure out that "Hashmark" and Top are the same guy, by the way. Ed Wood does not make this clear.) Top resents having to deal with these reservists, and the feeling is definitely mutual.

The most major event that occurs in the otherwise snoozy "Part 2" is that Jim receives a personal phone call during work hours from Nadine, a girl he is dating, and Top chews him out for it, only to then receive a nagging phone call from his own wife, who wants Top to pick up some groceries. It's a standard sitcom comeuppance.

The office atmosphere of Casual Company reminded me somewhat of the police stations in Wood's later films, Bride of the Monster and Night of the Ghouls. Wood tells us that one of Jerry's duties is to fetch Captain Roberts' newspaper each day, which is similar to a minor plot point in Bride. And just like the cops in Night, the servicemen in Casual Company are constantly trying to either delegate or shirk various unwanted responsibilities, including the stamping of record books. Ed Wood's eternal muse, booze, makes an early appearance here, too, with Captain Roberts eagerly anticipating an officer's club party "with good scotch and bourbon waiting, for free."

But there are two passages in particular that Wood's fans will want to read. In the first, Top shares some dialogue with a pretty, angora-clad girl at a cigar counter in the Ship's Service.

     The pretty girl in the tight fitting pink Angora sweater set came to him with a smile. "Good morning, First Sergeant," she chirped, cheerily.
     "Yeah!" exclaimed the First Sergeant.
     The girl looked at him closely. "We haven't met before," she informed the man. "But Elbo has told me an awful lot about you. I feel that I know you like a book."
     "I can just imagine what he has told you."
     "Oh, it was all good. Elbo is so wonderful."
     "Elbo, wonderful! This is a new one."
     "Elbo got me my job here. I just started this morning. I like it. Like my new sweater set? Angora ... I just bought it yesterday. I wanted a new sweater set for my new job. So out I went shopping. I saw this angora. It was so soft and cuddly and with this beautiful soft pink color, it is all so feminine. Something new for something new. Isn't that cute? Something new for something new ... I like that."
     "I'm glad you like it."
     "Ohh, I do ... I paid plenty for the sweater set, too."
     Top sighed ... "And I'm glad you like your job, and if you want to continue liking it, I suggest you get me five, fifteen cent cigars."
     The girl let her smile fade. Maybe all those things that Elbo had said about his First Sergeant were true, but even looking closely she didn't see any horns, nor did she see the hole in the man's head.

Apart from the fetishistic attention to the textural qualities (and exorbitant price) of angora rabbit fur, one may note the frequent use of ellipses and the comparison of the First Sergeant to a horned devil or demon. All are trademarks of Ed Wood's writing. Another intriguing, quintessentially Wood-ian quote comes near the end of "Part 2" when Top rants about the reservists, whom he deems less than manly. Were Casual Company more famous, certainly the following line would be among Ed Wood's most famous phrases:

"Ohh, to be with a man's outfit again, and far away from you pantie waist reserves."

I'm not sure if the punning on Wood's part is wholly conscious or intentional, but modern readers will certainly detect some coded messages here to Ed's own, tortured transvestism, which famously caused him anguish during his war years. Also present is Ed's eternal obsession with manliness. Wood himself has been described as "effeminate" by some observers, and his characters frequently brood over their own perceived lack of machismo.

It is interesting to note that self-styled man's man Top is symbolically emasculated by his nagging wife shortly after ranting about "pantie waist reserves," thus calling his own masculinity into question. All in all, even though this book can be classified as mere juvenilia, Ed Wood's Casual Company does show some early promise and still reads fairly well.

The main problem I encountered as a reader is that, about halfway through, the story jumps from one location (the Casual Company office) to another (the Ship's Service) with no transition at all. One second, we're with Jim, Jerry, and Elbo, the next with Top and the cigar girl. I have to wonder if Cult Movies ran two separate chapters together with no break. Otherwise, it's the literary equivalent of a jarring and unexplained jump cut.

Cult Movies ad (pg. 88)

This is a one-page ad for back issues of the magazine. What's notable is that Ed Wood's name appears on the covers of issues #7 and #8. The latter promises: "Coffin Joe, Vampira, Ed Wood, Lugosi & More!" Obviously, Eddie was a regular fixture in the pages of Cult Movies. According to Philip R. Frey's invaluable Ed Wood site, Cult Movies #3 (1991) also devoted its cover to Wood with the headline: "Edward D. Wood Jr.: The Story Must Be Told!!!," while the first part of The Casual Company appeared in issue #10 from June 1993.

Inside back cover

We are treated to two more stills ("exclusive first photos") from Ed Wood. The first depicts Lisa Marie as Vampira, hands on hips, standing imperially on the fog-shrouded set of her TV show. The second shows Johnny Depp and Martin Landau as Ed and Bela, watching TV at Bela's home. Below is a darned good approximation of the page. I had to do some searching for a still that showed not only Depp and Landau but the large painting of Bela Lugosi behind them.

Two more publicity stills from Touchstone's Ed Wood with Lisa Marie, Johnny Depp, and Martin Landau.

And that, my friends, is just about all the Ed Wood content you'll find in the eleventh issue of Cult Movies magazine. But even all that is far from everything you'll find in this slim but densely-packed publication. Along with pages and pages and pages of detailed movie and book reviews, there is a lengthy feature story about softcore filmmaker Barry Mahon, plus some Godzilla-related interviews, and even a look at "1937: Hollywood's Year of Tragedy."

In short, this is a goldmine of information about weird, offbeat, and underground motion pictures. One could say that magazines like Cult Movies have been rendered obsolete or redundant by the internet, but I would not agree. This is a professionally-produced piece of work, so it has a sense of authority that may be lacking from amateur fan sites. But it's not a slick, corporate-owned entity either, so it can afford to be more esoteric and niche-specific than most major entertainment websites could ever be today.

The sheer amount of research that has gone into just this one issue boggles my mind, and I don't think all of this stuff has turned up yet online, even twenty years later. Throughout my years as a hardcore movie geek, I've been dimly aware of the importance of magazines like Cult Movies, but I haven't really given them much time or attention until now. Maybe I should have.

Next: Thanks to a generous grant from the Philip R. Frey Foundation, Ed Wood Wednesdays is at last able to return to its original purpose of reviewing actual motion pictures. Can you believe it? I'll be reviewing movies again here! The magnanimous Mr. Frey sent me a whole passel of obscure Wood flicks, ones I'd tried to find without success, and I think it's high time I started digging into them. So that's just what I'll do. Make it back here in two weeks for my long-gestating examination of The Lawless Rider (1954).