From the age of six to my late twenties, I lived in a small town in mid-Michigan called Flushing. Go ahead and laugh at the name. You think I haven't heard every "Flushing" joke already? I resided there for longer than I've stayed anywhere else, but I've not been back in over a decade. Maybe I'll never return. Why should I? There's not much to Flushing, honestly. It's what you'd call a bedroom community. Other than a few small businesses and the usual smattering of shops and restaurants, Flushing is principally a place of residence for folks who work somewhere else.
In fact, most of Flushing's identity comes from its status as a suburb of Flint, a grungy, mid-sized factory town whose economy and population were already badly waning by the time I grew up due to the drastic decline of the city's one-and-only industry, the manufacture of automobiles. For a heavily biased, chronologically dubious yet entertaining take on the long, slow death of Flint, see Michael Moore's rabble-rousing documentary Roger & Me (1989). Short version: Flint put all of its economic eggs in a basket marked "General Motors," then discovered to its horror and befuddlement that the basket had a hole in the bottom.
I was largely shielded from this, since my parents both had steady employment which was only indirectly reliant on GM. Dad taught high school history, and Mom ran a discount children's clothing store before becoming a professor at a nearby community college. We were comfortable. We didn't live in luxury, but money was never a concern. Flushing was located at the exact cusp where urban met rural, but instead of giving the town a delightful sense of diversity, this just meant that many of my schoolmates fell into two categories: mean rednecks with chips on their shoulders and (even worse) snotty, over-privileged brats with a fearsome sense of entitlement. Lord help me, I hated living there. I wanted Flushing to be wiped off the map by a meteor, erasing me along with it.
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| A vintage issue of The Blazer. |
Perhaps to overcome my painful, almost-debilitating adolescent shyness, I was in quite a few extracurricular activities during high school -- the marching band, the quiz bowl team, National Honor Society, that kind of thing. But none of them meant even half as much to me as being a member of the editorial staff of the school newspaper,
The Blazer, which advertised itself as "Flushing High School's Independent Voice." How independent it truly was, I don't know. I think the slogan referred to the fact that the cost of the publication was paid for through advertising and not by the local school system, so we were (theoretically) not beholden to the administration.
We didn't have complete artistic freedom, though. There were certainly limits to what we could publish, and, being a wiseass, I ran up against them all the time. As institutions go, schools have notoriously poor senses of humor and inordinately delicate sensibilities. One must therefore be political in such a situation. For me, though, the compromise was definitely worth it. Because of the newspaper, I had a forum in which I could write abut things that mattered to me, namely films and music and comedy. This was before there really was such a thing as the Internet, but not much before. I had no sense of what was coming, technologically, other than the vague awareness that there was some way to receive pornography through the computer.
The Blazer might just have saved my life. One-hundred percent of the credit for that goes to the paper's staff advisor, Ms. Sharrow, who ran
The Blazer in a half-strict, half-indulgent way that I found very conducive to writing. She was, hands down, the best teacher I ever had -- not just because she encouraged me to pursue all my arcane pop culture interests (though she did this) and looked the other way when I reviewed R-rated movies like
Blue Velvet and
Andy Warhol's Dracula (she did this, too), but because she treated me like... well, not like an equal or a peer, but not like a clueless kid either. I mean, I
was a clueless kid, but she didn't let on. Students gravitated to Ms. Sharrow. The newspaper office, which during the school day was her classroom, became a hangout for me and several of my closest friends. We took as many classes from Ms. Sharrow as we could and spent our lunches there, too. After school, the room became kind of a clubhouse within the bland, cinder-block confines of our otherwise-unwelcoming and utterly unremarkable suburban high school.
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| A book that changed my life. |
Somewhere in my mid-teens, which would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, I found Edward D. Wood, Jr. the way other people find Jesus. Eddie died when I was three, and his movies started to catch on when I was in kindergarten, so I can't say I got in on the ground floor of the Ed Wood cult. Well, I could say that, but I'd be lying like hell. The truth is that I didn't even see a frame of his work until I was 17 years old. I knew the name well before that, though. It had been my habit since childhood to flip through video and movie guides -- which back then were brick-sized paperbacks you actually purchased in a bookstore -- and scrutinize all the zero- and one-star reviews. Perhaps that's where titles like
Plan 9 from Outer Space and
Glen or Glenda? first entered my conscience.
But around my freshman or sophomore year, two seminal "film nerd" books took up permanent residence in my brain:
Cult Movies by Danny Peary, which included a lengthy, informative, and humorous essay on
Plan 9; and
Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, which devoted a few pages of its "Drag" section to
Glen or Glenda?, including the story -- which I've never encountered anywhere else -- of how
Glenda was almost re-released by Paramount Pictures in March 1981. According to
Midnight Movies, Paramount even placed an ad for the film in the
New York Times, but backed out "at the last minute" and "cancelled the opening, apparently citing the attempted assassination of President Reagan as their reason."
Interestingly, though
Midnight Movies does not mention it, John Candy and Dan Aykroyd actually recreated
Glenda's infamous "angora sweater hand-off" scene in
It Came from Hollywood (1982). The film, which contains clips from both
Plan 9 and
Glenda, was released by -- you guessed it -- Paramount Pictures. In any event, I was just starting to learn about "underground" and "cult" cinema as an adolescent, and the books by Peary and Hoberman/Rosenbaum became my de facto bibles. It's amazing what a seismic and permanent impact those two volumes had on my moviegoing tastes. Of all the strange, out-of-the-mainstream movies they discussed and dissected, the ones I was most curious to see were the ones directed by Ed Wood. The trouble was, I had no idea how to go about finding them. The local video stores didn't carry these flicks, and the Internet was in its larval stage back then. This was a couple of years before Tim Burton's
Ed Wood, so information about Eddie was not so easily located by a Midwestern kid. If Rudolph Grey's
Nightmare of Ecstasy existed, it hadn't come to our town yet.
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| Dennis Ferrara in 2007, essentially unchanged. |
Then, in the fall of 1992, a miracle! Flint's Mott Community College, where my mother worked as an English teacher, announced that it was hosting a Tribute to Edward D. Wood, Jr., featuring four of his notorious films, including the Holy Grail itself,
Plan 9 from Outer Space. I can scarcely explain to you how incongruous and unexpected this event truly was back then. Ed Wood was far from a household name in 1992, and even if he had been, Flint is not exactly the kind of town to put on a film festival devoted to a cross-dressing "B"-moviemaker from the 1950s. For me, it was like winning the lottery.
Overcome with enthusiasm, I asked my mother to arrange an interview with the festival's organizer, Dennis Ferrara. She and Dennis got along well, so this was easily accomplished. I pitched the idea as a double-page spread to Ms. Sharrow, and of course she said yes, too. I can still remember driving over to MCC with Eric Larned, a classmate of mine who was gracious enough to serve as the photographer for the piece. (I doubt he had any interest in the topic, so thanks for being a good sport, Eric.) We met Dennis in his office on campus, and I think it was Eric's idea to have him pose in front of a huge poster of Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein Monster.
Technically, half of Mott's film festival was devoted to James Whale, who directed two
Frankenstein films, but at that age, I didn't give two damns about either Whale or
Frankenstein. I wanted to talk about Ed Wood, and Dennis was happy to oblige. He was a witty, chatty guy. If you want to picture him, try imagining a cross between George Costanza and Niles Crane. Dennis seems to have worked at Mott until about 2010. He'd be in his mid-60s by now. The most recent tidbit about him I could find was
this article about his participation in the Michigan chapter of the Organ Historical Society. I distinctly remember being especially pleased with this article, even though (acting as my own editor) I didn't put a great deal of thought into the layout or presentation of the material.
Besides the interview with Dennis, I included a schedule of events for the festival and a sidebar piece called "Edward D. Wood: A beginner's guide." And "beginner" is truly the word, friends. I based this whole piece based on second-hand information before ever watching any of Eddie's movies. Looking back on it now, I cringe at a few of the factual errors (most of the release dates for the movies are wrong, for instance) and the fact that I merely regurgitated some of the urban myths about Wood (like the ubiquitous "paper plates as flying saucers" canard). Overall, though, I was happy to see that my writing style was still recognizable (to me, at least), even in a story I'd written 20+ years ago. I'm still no Mike Wallace when it comes to interviewing people, so I'm glad I was able to cobble together a coherent, readable article from my conversation with Dennis Ferrara.
: The Ed Wood festival was successful enough to continue for several years in Flint. The print edition of
folded a couple of years back. Ms. Sharrow has since retired as well. I feel badly for the students at Flushing who will not get to have her as a teacher. My beloved high school newspaper seems to have continued as
for a while, but this has not been updated in nearly a year. In a real-world, physical sense, "Flushing High School's Independent Voice" exists only as back issues in the file cabinets, desk drawers, and hall closets of graduates like myself.
Click on the images below to see full-sized scans of the original "Scare Tactics" article from October 1992. Beneath that is the complete text of the piece. Enjoy.
