Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 270: The Ed Wood/Chuck Berry double feature of 1959! [PART 2]

Two 1950s icons: Chuck Berry and Vampira!

Last week, we talked about how Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) was teamed up with Paul Landres' Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) for a popular, widely-seen double feature that played at dozens of theaters and drive-ins, including numerous bookings in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Delaware, and Connecticut, among many other places. This was how thousands of American teenagers (and a few Canadian ones) saw Eddie's most famous film for the first time, and it must have made a major impression on at least some of them. Who knows? Maybe some future filmmaker attended one of these screenings and thought, "I could do that."

Hal Roach.

As I said, it was likely Plan 9 investor Ed Reynolds who sold the film to a New York company called Distributors Corporation of America circa 1958. That company retitled the film (it had originally been Grave Robbers from Outer Space) and created a vigorous marketing campaign for it, including an iconic if somewhat misleading poster designed by artist Tom Jung. To this day, most prints of the movie still begin with the DCA logo. While none of this was financially advantageous to Ed Wood, at least the movie he considered his pride and joy was getting in front of audiences.

While it was a natural to pair a sci-fi movie with a rock & roll movie, since both genres had such strong teenage appeal in the 1950s, the real connection between Plan 9 and Johnny might have been legendary producer Hal Roach (1892-1992), best known for his work with Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and the Our Gang series. Roach's name turns up periodically in the Ed Wood story as well. Eddie, for instance, remembered meeting comic actor Franklin Pangborn at Hal Roach's studio. And Heather Tanchuck, daughter of screenwriter Nathaniel Tanchuck, had a vague memory of Eddie himself working for Roach. (Considering the Pangborn story, she might've been right!)

Hal Roach bought DCA in 1958, right around the time the company purchased Grave Robbers from Outer Space from Ed Reynolds. In Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), actor Gregory Walcott suggests that it was Roach who brokered the sale. And Hal's son, Hal Roach, Jr. (1918-1972), was one of the producers of Go, Johnny, Go! In his self-titled 1987 autobiography, Chuck Berry recalled spending "five days in Culver City, California, working at the Hal Roach Studio" making Go, Johnny, Go! and being impressed by "all the big movie cameras and technical equipment." The two films also shared a marketing firm, Ben Adler Advertising Services. Adler employee Tom Jung designed the poster for Johnny as well.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 269: The Ed Wood/Chuck Berry double feature of 1959! [PART 1]

Two movies, one poster artist! Yes, Tom Jung painted both of these.

Ed Wood's most famous film, the sci-fi/horror hybrid Grave Robbers from Outer Space, premiered at the Carlton Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, March 15, 1957. Lord only knows what the audience thought of it. Eddie certainly must have been curious, because he handed out comment cards to his viewers, asking for their favorite scenes and whatever miscellaneous thoughts they might have about the movie. (I wonder if any filled-out cards have survived from that fateful night?)

To say the least, Grave Robbers is an oddity, combining wonky special effects, stilted dialogue, a surreal plot about an alien invasion of Earth, grainy footage of the late Bela Lugosi, and even the pseudo-apocalyptic rantings of TV personality Criswell. The end result is less like a coherent narrative and more like a strange, half-remembered dream somehow preserved on celluloid. For these reasons and more, writer-director Wood had very little luck getting Grave Robbers distributed after the premiere. As actor Gregory Walcott told Rudolph Grey in the book Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992): "Nobody would touch the darn thing." Even with such well-known figures as Lugosi, Criswell, Tor Johnson, and Vampira in the cast, the movie was going to be a tough sell. 

Was there Hope for Plan 9?

Producer Ed Reynolds was understandably nervous about all this, since he'd sunk plenty of his own money into the production and had convinced others at the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills to do the same. How was he going to get any of his (or their) money back? According to both Gregory Walcott and Ed Wood's widow, Kathy, it was Reynolds who wrangled control of Graverobbers away from Ed Wood and sold the film to a New York company called Distributors Corporation of America. 

This sale proved a turning point in the movie's history. In 1958, DCA changed the title to Plan 9 from Outer Space and released it to theaters and drive-ins across America—on a limited basis at first, then more widely starting in July 1959. By 1960, Plan 9 was already popping up on television, where it would remain a late-night staple for decades. I've seen no evidence that Eddie profited from this, and I doubt the original investors were reimbursed either, but at least somebody was making money from the movie. And, more crucially, it was being seen by thousands of impressionable youngsters.

Back in those days, double and triple features were much more common than they are today. Theatergoers of the 1950s were accustomed to getting multiple films for the price of admission, plus some added cartoons and shorts. Sometimes, theaters would offer a big budget main feature and a cheaply-made second feature on the same bill. That's what B-movies originally were, essentially cinematic appetizers for more prestigious films. But, as can be seen in vintage newspaper ads from the 1950s and '60s, it was also fairly common for two or three low-budget films of roughly equal stature to be packaged together and shown on the same bill. Which was the "main" feature? Flip a coin.

With its brisk 80-minute runtime and rock bottom price point, Plan 9 from Outer Space was an ideal "programmer," i.e. a movie that could fill out a double or triple bill as either the main or supporting feature. And that was its fate for years. In various American cities, it was paired up with such titles as Outlaw Women (1952), Alias Jesse James (1959), The Crawling Eye (1958), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Time Lock (1957), and The Trap (1959). Most of these are sci-fi and horror films, as you'd expect, but some are comedies and Westerns. So exhibitors must have felt that the genre-hopping Plan 9 made a suitable companion to just about anything they had to offer. (I've even argued that the finale of Plan 9 is Western-like, since Tom Keene, Greg Walcott, and Duke Moore form a posse and settle their differences with the aliens with a barroom-style brawl.)