Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Loop Odyssey, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

You'd need your own projector and a screen to see much of Ed Wood's work in the 1970s.

"When Caballero first started [as Cinema Classics], they just did 8mm movies. They'd put one-liners, captions, on the bottom of the screen, just like silent films. They gave Ed a hundred bucks to write ten movies. There had to be fifty lines in each movie, minimum."

-Phil Cambridge

Pendulum-family magazine artist and friend of Ed Wood

(source: Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy)

The Swedish Erotica logo in purple.

The general consensus these days credits Ed Wood as writer/director of the first 19 (likely beyond) Swedish Erotica loops. First sold via mail order to the home-market in 8mm, circa 1973/1974—in my estimation, some of the loops were shot a year or two earlier—the series laid the first foundational stone of one of the paramount brands of the so-called Golden Age of porn. In this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays, we're taking a closer look at one of these loops, endeavoring to discover a fingerprint or something like it.

And that matters because, beyond this series, Ed may very well have worked on 800+ loops in some capacity, as early as 1968, through the mid '70s. Editor. Director. Writer. Actor. Boxcover summaries. And, perhaps his mainstay in this channel, onscreen captions.

The seventh loop in the Swedish Erotica series—following Wet & Wild and preceding Girl on a Bike—-Park Lovers stars John Holmes and a female performer commonly misidentified as porn actress Eve Orlon, whose credits include The Undergraduate and Fugitive Girls. (More on her later.)

There are 32 captions in this particular loop, totaling 115 words. That's an average of 3.59 words per line, these captions ranging from one to seven words in length.

I gave my plain-jane handwritten transcriptions of the captions to my partner Kitten just minutes after I had completed them. She reacted with disdain, and pointed out to me what should have been obvious: the reductionist, cro-magnon level of sheer pornography. The inherently discordant cinematic presentation, with its relatively elaborate pans and candy-colored sets, ossifies into an, at best, outmoded past. The worst of it enters the sad realm of "It only hurts at first."

Buck up! This is porn!