Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Glen or Glenda Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

Totally radical! Ed Wood Mania was already in full swing by the 1980s!

Off the Wall as it looked in the 1980s.

Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy and Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood introduced many viewers to the work of Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the 1990s. But the late writer-director's strange posthumous career was already well underway by then. After the publication of Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards in 1980, Eddie's older films started to get prominent bookings in theaters across the country. And they were starting to attract serious critical attention as well.

On July 16, 1982, for instance, Glen or Glenda began a two-week engagement at Off the Wall Cinema in Cambridge, MA. Off the Wall was, as its name suggests, an eccentric art theater and coffee house specializing in obscure and bizarre movies. (Unfortunately, this well-loved venue closed in 1986.) Glenda was playing on a double bill with The Little Shop of Horrors, the 1960 Roger Corman cheapie about a killer talking plant. Interestingly, Little Shop was also gaining a new fanbase in the 1980s, due to a stage musical adaptation that had just opened Off-Off-Broadway on May 6, 1982.

Theater and film critic John Engstrom reviewed Glen or Glenda in the July 17, 1982 edition of The Boston Globe. His article is quite a find. Long before Grey or Burton, Engstrom shrewdly identified Glenda as a key Wood work. While pointing out the film's many shortcomings, he also notes that the movie was incredibly forward-thinking for its vintage, hailing it as "compassionate and enlightened."

Here's the article in its entirety. Enjoy. As a little bonus, this newspaper clipping also includes a print ad for another quintessential cult movie of the era: Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981).

John Engstrom's 1982 review of Glen or Glenda.

"As a movie," Engstrom writes, "[Glen or Glenda] transcends its own incompetence and attains something like dignity." That's a pretty far cry from what the Medveds were saying about Eddie's movies at the time.

Happy Independence Day, everybody!

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Glen or Glenda Odyssey, Part Four by Greg Dziawer

The Christine Jorgensen case brought Ed Wood some publicity in 1953.

Christine Jorgensen in 1953.

Back in 2016, I shared with you an interesting wire service story about Ed Wood's debut feature Glen or Glenda. Written by prolific UPI staffer Aline Mosby, this piece explained how Wood's film—which it referred to as I Changed My Sex—shrewdly capitalized on the sensational saga of trans woman Christine Jorgensen. The article was syndicated to papers across (most of) the country on February 19-20, 1953, just a few days after Jorgensen's attention-grabbing return to the United States.

Arriving by jet from Copenhagen, Jorgensen had touched down at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in Queens on February 13. Mere months prior, on December 1, 1952, the Daily News had run this blaring headline: EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY. And, with that, Christine Jorgensen became the most famous person in the world to have ever undergone sexual reassignment surgery. The native New Yorker's transformation, in fact, would take another year to be complete. For his inaugural directing gig, Edward D. Wood, Jr. utilized the real life Jorgensen drama as a jumping-off point for his highly unique and extremely personal one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Glen or Glenda.

While I was certain at the time that Mosby's article was the earliest public ink ever devoted to Wood's film, I recently found another that had been published only two days earlier. This one had been penned by Los Angeles Times drama critic Edwin Schallert, father of the incredibly prolific and beloved character actor William Schallert. In Edwin's column on February 17, 1953, we read:

ODD SCIENCE FANTASY ON FOOT

LUGOSI TO APPEAR AS WEIRD SCIENTIST

That veteran portrayer of mysterious scoundrels and what-not, Bela Lugosi, will soon be visible on the screen again in a weird science fiction subject titled "Transvestite," which concerns the transformation of men into women in their apparel and other outward manifestations but which does not deal with any sex issue. It's sponsor, Edward D. Wood Jr., declares it has no relation to a case much spotlighted in the news. Lugosi will be the mastermind in the science phase of the picture, which is said to incorporate much symbolism. Others in the cast are Dolores Fuller, whose fiance falls under the Lugosi influence, while Lyle Talbot will be seen as a police inspector and Tim Farrell as a psychiatrist. Roles of the victims are minor. The film is being finished at the Jack Miles studio.

Was Lugosi filmed at Jack Miles Studio?

For such a relatively short blurb, there's a lot to mull over here. 

Edwin Schallert, for instance, refers to Wood's film as Transvestite rather than I Changed My Sex. Although he got to press first, Schallert presumably wrote his column sometime after Aline Mosby had written hers—certainly not by much, likely a few days. The evidence of this is that Schallert states that the film was "being finished at the Jack Miles studio." Mosby, on the other hand, had trailed the production to W. Merle Connell's Quality Studios in Hollywood, where we know the bulk of the interiors for Glen or Glenda were shot. 

Some sources claim that Bela Lugosi's sequences were filmed separately at Jack Miles' Los Angeles studio. If so, it's fair to assume that these scenes were shot last. In her 2009 autobiography A Fuller Life, Dolores Fuller notes that Glen or Glenda was "shot in only five days with no budget." Under those circumstances, it's not difficult to imagine that Wood and company simply moved from Quality Studios to the Jack Miles studio because the latter location possessed the right set for Lugosi's scenes.

It's also interesting to note that, as in the Mosby article, the science-fiction aspect of the production is foregrounded in the Schallert column, and there's a deliberate statement to distance the film from Christine Jorgensen. In Schallert's article, the subject is so obvious that she is not even mentioned by name. My favorite statement, though—and we are doubtless reading Ed's thoughts and/or words throughout both of these articles—is that the film "does not deal with a sex issue." 

For its part, the IMDb notes the film's shooting locations as both the Quality and Jack Miles Studios, along with the Columbia/Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. Incidentally, Jack's studio is also credited in the Wood-scripted The Violent Years from 1956, and Miles himself is credited for "settings" or as art director or production designer, depending on the source, for Glen or Glenda. 

Christine at the Silver Slipper

Jorgensen was frequently in the news throughout December 1952, right through the winter of 1953. On the same day as the Schallert article, she appeared in a syndicated photo feature, which noted that she had "changed her sex." And on February 25, 1953, Oakland Tribune staffer Wood Soanes lifted from the Mosby article, adding fresh details, including producer George Weiss being one of Poverty Row's most successful producers and agent Al Rosen offering Christine Jorgensen the lead in the film. A charming piece, it appears to have resulted from talking to Weiss, himself, sans Eddie. 

I've always wondered if the tale of Jorgensen being offered the lead in Glen or Glenda were apocryphal. This article suggests it wasn't. Connecting the dots, we'll surmise that Weiss himself offered the property to Rosen, who had initiated a seemingly failed attempt to represent Jorgensen in the States within less than two weeks of the BLONDE BEAUTY headline that had started it all. Why do I think this? A syndicated article on December 11, 1952 notes that: 

[Jorgensen] confirmed she had received an offer to star in a new Hollywood version of the comedy "Mary Had A Little," planned by producer Al Rosen. Although Christine denied she already had signed to appear in the picture and make personal stage appearances with it, her Danish manager, Blicher Hansen, indicated the one-time soldier had signed other American contracts. 

Mary Had a Little..., if the same film, was finally made—without Jorgensen—in the UK in 1961. As for Christine herself, she continued on in the entertainment industry but never became the star she had hoped. 

Likewise Ed Wood. A year or so after shooting Glen or Glenda, Ed landed Bela Lugosi a live burlesque gig at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas. Ironically, this precluded Lugosi from appearing in Wood's next feature, The Hidden Face (better known as Jail Bait). According to Dolores Fuller, Eddie immediately began filming that crime drama as soon as the funding came through. The role intended for Lugosi was instead essayed by the mind-bogglingly prolific Herbert Rawlinson, a former leading man from the silent era, in what would prove to be his final role.

Despite Eddie's claim of Glen or Glenda having no relation to the Christine Jorgensen story, Wood and Jorgensen have been entangled ever since, their careers intersecting in various ways. In December of 1955, for instance, Jorgensen appeared in her own live show at—you guessed it—the Silver Slipper. And in the 1960s, she would be a subject of writer Carlson Wade, whose work is commonly mis-Ed-tributed to our Eddie. Continuing to conflate the transgendered with transvestites, Jorgensen even appeared in drag stage shows with legendary cross-dresser T.C. Jones, who had been "cast" by Ed in his screenplay for the never-filmed 7 Rue Pigalle.

Alas, these are subjects for other odysseys on other days.

Left: T.C. Jones. Right: A poster for Mary Had a Little... (1961).

   
Bonus: There's a generous selection of newspaper clippings about Christine Jorgensen and Glen or Glenda at the Ed Wood Wednesdays Tumblr.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Set Decoration Odyssey, Part Four by Greg Dziawer

Actress Lita Grey stands in front of a very familiar painting in The Devil's Sleep (1949).

Poster for The Devil's Sleep.

Last week, I identified a familiar-looking sailboat painting in the background of a shot from The Body Beautiful, a one-reel glamour short from the early 1950s. This same work of art also hangs on the wall of Glen's apartment in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953). Hoping to build on this connection, I decided to go hunting for the painting elsewhere, starting in the most likely place: movies that were made at hole-in-the-wall Quality Studios in Hollywood. 

We know that Eddie filmed the interiors for Glen or Glenda at Quality on Santa Monica Blvd., the same facility where he filmed Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). I surmised, therefore, that The Body Beautiful was filmed there as well. Reusing set decorations in the interest of economy is a longstanding practice in the world of low budget films. For example, it is quite common in the adult 8mm loops and features that Ed Wood worked on during the 1970s.

In the 2015 book Dreaming in Angora: The Life and Films of Ed Wood, author Pablo Bendix III notes: "The Pentagon office depicted [in Plan 9 from Outer Space] includes a map of the United States with the sign of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The same map appears in Bagdad After Midnight (1954), which was also filmed at Quality Studios. It was probably a standard prop used by the studio." Bendix was undoubtedly correct, and it wasn't the sole instance of a prop being recycled at Quality. 

In The Devil's Sleep, a Screen Classics title from 1949, another map (different from the one in Plan 9) shows up in two different rooms within the same film. Actor Timothy Farrell, Glen or Glenda's understanding Dr. Alton, appears in The Devil's Sleep as sleazeball Umberto Scalli. This was the first of his three appearances for producer George Weiss, and it's eerie to see him channel the same soothing empathy he would use as Dr. Alton, only this time for sinister ends. A cheap noir drugsploitation flick, The Devil's Sleep was shot at—where else?—Quality Studios. 

And the cluster of correspondences only begins there. 

The Devil's Sleep was shot by none other than William C. Thompson, who served as Ed Wood's trusty, colorblind cinematographer on all his features from Glen or Glenda in 1953 to The Sinister Urge in 1960. Furthermore, The Devil's Sleep was directed by W. Merle Connell, the same man credited with creating the burlesque and whipping footage inserted into Glen's nightmare in Glen or Glenda.

Connell is an interesting figure in his own right. A veteran of exploitation cinema, he began making burlesque shorts for Quality Pictures in 1946, partnering with a man named Nathan Robin. Initially making one-reel striptease flicks like Dancing Dolls of Burlesque, featuring girls performing at the Follies Theater in Los Angeles, Connell soon opened Quality Studios. After a brief run of films with Robin, many of which were shot at actual burlesque houses, Connell partnered with George Weiss in 1947. 

Weiss' office was almost directly across the street from Quality Studios. Together, over the course of about a half-dozen years, Weiss and Connell would churn out an amazing string of low-budget exploitation shorts, features, and features compiled from shorts. For instance, the aforementioned Body Beautiful was shot at Quality Studios and directed by Connell. 

The painting appears in The Devil's Sleep.

But getting back to The Devil's Sleep. The recycled map in that film is not the only set decoration that jumped out at me. The map appears in two different rooms—actually, the same set redressed. In one of those rooms, the infamous sailboat painting makes yet another appearance. In one shot, it can be seen tucked away at the extreme right edge of the frame. In another, it can be glimpsed over the left shoulder of actress Lita Grey, the second wife of movie legend Charlie Chaplin.

This seemingly ordinary, nondescript painting was obviously a much-reused prop, appearing repeatedly in films shot at Quality Studios. But just how ubiquitous was it? And what other recurring set decorations might we find in these films? Those are questions to be answered in future installments of this feature. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Glen or Glenda Odyssey, Part Three by Greg Dziawer

Captain DeZita, as depicted by the redoubtable Drew Friedman.

The fateful compilation.

A few weeks ago, I was scanning through some vintage burlesque and related shorts, not really looking for anything in particular on the Ed Wood research front. I was aware, though, that I was in a potential target zone of connections to Ed and that, given those fertile conditions, some startling ideas for articles can blossom unexpectedly. Startling because they seem... new! Sudden!

Eventually, I arrived at the final short on a now-decades-old compilation from Something Weird Video called Grindhouse Follies, Volume 2. I did a double-take at what I saw on the screen. 

The short in question was The Body Beautiful, credited to Roadshow Attractions, a company begun by exploitation pioneer Dwain Esper in the early 1930s. Roadshow was still distributing exploitation films two decades later, except by that time it was being run by Esper's former partner Louis Sonney. In their prime, Esper and Sonney had been among the original "Forty Thieves" of film exploitation lore. Legendary B-movie magnate George Weiss often produced shorts and features in the early '50s that were distributed by Sonney. The name George Weiss should certainly ring a bell even for casual fans of Ed Wood's work, since Weiss was the producer of 1953's Glen or Glenda and was colorfully portrayed by Mike Starr in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. 

A masseur in The Body Beautiful.

What initially made me do that double-take during The Body Beautiful was the presence of a certain very familiar-looking masseur. In the first half of this 13-minute film, this slight, balding, mustachioed man demonstrates a variety of massage techniques on the body of a voluptuous young lady. He works carefully, woodenly, and inexpertly, with a towel just barely covering any exposure of his customer's taboo flesh. 

Reaching for my trusty copy of Eric Shaefer's indispensable Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, I looked up the short in the appendix and discovered that it had been written and directed by one W. Merle Connell. Connell often shot and/or directed films for Weiss' company Screen Classics, including such exploitation perennials as Test Tube Babies and The Devil's Sleep. Wood obsessives likely recognize both of those titles as films in which actor Timothy Farrell appeared early in his astonishing, albeit brief, career. 

Farrell gives one of many breathtaking performances in Glen or Glenda, narrating the film as well as portraying kindly, sympathetic Dr. Alton. The amazing Farrell rates a Wood regular, also appearing in Jail Bait (1954) and The Violent Years (1956). Connell, incidentally, is credited with shooting the insert footage that comprises Glen's nightmarish fantasy of burlesque dancing and S&M in Glen or Glenda. 

Captain DeZita in Glen or Glenda.

For us true Wood obsessives, the director's movies contain many fleeting but memorable appearances by outlandish characters. Chief among these is Satan himself, who pops up during the nightmare sequences in Glen or Glenda. Considering how brief his screen time actually is, this shadowy, demonic figure has had quite a long-lasting impact on viewers and must rank high on any list of indelible performances in Wood's films. 

As portrayed by the mysterious, Austrian-born Captain DeZita (1890-1955), Satan is an odious presence in Glen or Glenda with his truly wicked grin and piercing eyes. The makeup by Wood regular Harry Thomas must also be noted, as it contributes brilliantly to the overall effect. But ultimately it's DeZita himself—with his otherworldly, even scary intensity—that burns itself on the brains of all who have seen this movie.

Although the actor is not given any onscreen credit, the IMDb lists Glen or Glenda as DeZita's sole movie role. Specifically, he is credited with playing both Satan and Glen's father, an evocative duality worth pondering. It's a bit like the theatrical tradition of having the same actor portray both Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in productions of Peter Pan.

Once I saw the masseur in The Body Beautiful, I immediately pulled up Glen or Glenda on my computer in a separate window. Comparing the two films side by side validated my surmise: The masseur is indeed played by Captain DeZita, who in reality was a booking agent for strip clubs. He looks slightly younger in Beautiful, and given its relative chastity, the short appears to have been shot a few years prior to Glenda. Actresses were routinely baring their breasts onscreen (albeit with pasties) by around 1953 or '54, as evidenced by Connell's Bagdad [sic] Over Midnite. That film, also from Screen Classics, is suspected to have some possible involvement by Ed Wood. 

Shaefer notes The Body Beautiful being in color, but Something Weird's version is black-and-white. Shot with synchronized sound—although the soundtrack of this print lags terribly behind the image— this film affords us the opportunity to hear the Captain's rather matter-of-fact, heavily Austrian accented, and even somewhat soft-spoken voice. Oddly, he sports a small, white, square object—a bandage, perhaps?—below his left ear.

The Body Beautiful has the feel of an early white-coater, i.e. a salacious movie unconvincingly disguised as an educational documentary. As DeZita massages the girl, he recites a dry, technical explanation of the efficacy of massage and how it impacts the curves of the beautiful bodies on display. The latter half of the short features footage of girls exercising, as well as a girl-on-girl massage. Magnificently prosaic, the short leaves all of the dirty up to the imaginations of its targeted male audience.

To use a phrase beloved in the world of ballyhoo: But wait! There's more!

I continued comparing Glen or Glenda and The Body Beautiful side by side on my computer screen. In one window, I scanned forward in Glenda to find the shots of Glen's father sitting at the bar. In another window, I paused on DeZita in Beautiful as he hovered over the girl on his massage table. While doing all this, I happened to notice a curious background detail in Glenda: a painting of sailboats on the wall in Glen's apartment, seen when Glen and Barbara are finally establishing mutual empathy.

Sure enough, in The Body Beautiful, this very same painting hangs in the background of the spartan set over DeZita's left shoulder. It shows up on the wall in the next sequence, too, as the girls exercise. The painting makes its final appearance during the film's girl-girl massage sequence.

Curiously, in Glen or Glenda, the sailboat painting is draped by a curtain, an aesthetic nicety that would be ubiquitous in the pornographic loops produced by Bernie Bloom and his son Noel in the 1970s. Those films, on which Ed Wood also labored in various capacities, feature a multitude of recurring paintings and other recycled set decorations.

A sailboat painting shows up in both The Body Beautiful and Glen or Glenda.

The recurring presence of the sailboat painting suggests that The Body Beautiful was shot at the same facility as the interiors for Glen or Glenda, namely Quality Studios on Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles. (Quality was a frequent home to producer George Weiss.) It further suggests that Captain DeZita may have appeared in more films that are floating around out there. Perhaps, like The Body Beautiful, there are undiscovered DeZita performances that have been right under our noses all along.

Most importantly, a discovery like the sailboat painting suggests a whole universe of intriguing Woodian interstices. It's a subject that demands further investigation... and more.

We'll follow up on all of these suggestions in future editions of this feature, delving deeper into Ed Wood's depictions of Satan and his execrable arts across various media. And, naturally, we'll dive headfirst into the sizzling, sulfurous career of William Michael Achilles De Orgler DeZita.

Captain DeZita as both Satan and Glen's father in Glen or Glenda.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 66: Ed Wood and the search for home

Dr. Eric Vornoff mourns the life he left behind in Bride Of The Monster (1955).

"Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home."

-Dr. Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) in Bride Of The Monster

Kubrick: Communication breakdown.

If you watch any director's films back to back to back, certain patterns are bound to emerge. Most prominent filmmakers return to particular "pet" themes, images, and motifs throughout their careers. Robert Altman is probably going to have his characters talking over each other. Quentin Tarantino loves women's feet. Stanley Kubrick is going to point his camera up at his characters when they go insane or are under extreme duress. Alfred Hitchcock sure did have a thing for those icy blondes, and many of his heroes are wrongly accused of terrible crimes. Martin Scorsese's Catholic guilt is always bubbling underneath any story he tells.

Directors return to what interests them or what has worked for them in the past. Ed Wood is no exception to the rule. Watch his movies (or read his novels and stories, for that matter) and you'll notice certain stubbornly recurring themes: death, transvestism, alcoholism, etc.

But, occasionally, binge-watching a director's entire filmography -- or most of it, anyway -- reveals unexpected fixations. A few years ago, for instance, I noticed how Stanley Kubrick often showed his characters as being spatially isolated from one another and, thus, reliant on technology for communication. This is most obvious in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which his main characters are in outer space and can only speak to relatives or journalists back on Earth via television monitors. But then there is poor, lonely Wendy in The Shining (1980), trapped in a mountaintop hotel with her deranged husband and deeply disturbed son. Her only lifeline to the outside world is her CB radio, which she uses to speak to local lawmen, perhaps her only friends in the world. And then there is Dr. Strangelove (1964), a film in which the action takes place on three hyper-isolated fronts: the War Room in Washington, Burpelson Air Force Base, and a bomber plane called the Leper Colony. The whole movie hinges on long-distance communication between these three locations. Too often, messages are either not received or are misinterpreted along the way, ultimately leading to disaster.

Portrait of Ed Wood as a young man.

Are there themes hidden in the oeuvre of Edward D. Wood, Jr. as well?  Yes, I would say there are. I have already written about how most of Wood's famous films are essentially police procedurals in the tradition of Jack Webb and Dragnet. But over time, I noticed another key theme of Wood's work, one that does not receive sufficient comment from critics: the importance of home. As forehead-slapplingly simple as this idea is, it is nevertheless crucial to understanding both the life and work of Ed Wood. Eddie spent years trying to find a place to call his own, and his characters seem to go through similar struggles.

Home was not an issue for Ed in the first few decades of his life. As Greg Dziawer has ably pointed out in his articles about Ed Wood's early youth, the future director of Plan 9 From Outer Space lived with his family in various locations scattered throughout his hometown of Poughkeepsie. But, other than that, his childhood seems pretty sedate and predictable. He grew up in a stable, two-parent household and was able to make and maintain friendships with boys his age at school. Sure, his relationship with his brother, William, was marred by jealousy of the latter towards the former. And it's been suggested (albeit not without controversy) that Ed's cloying mother, Lillian, may be to blame for Ed's later cross-dressing. But at least little Eddie never had to worry about where his next meal was coming from or where he was going to sleep.

After Wood moved to Los Angeles in 1947 to pursue show business, his life became -- and would remain -- peripatetic. He worked in a variety of capacities in Hollywood over the course of 30 years, including actor, director, writer, producer, and even stuntman, but never won respect or acclaim in any of them. He worked in film, theater, and television, but none of these made him rich or famous (at least while he was alive). He established a few long-term working relationships with people like publisher Bernie Bloom and producer-director Stephen C. Apostolof over the years, too, but these didn't bring him anything like financial stability or security. If there is one fact upon which all observers can agree, it's that Eddie never had any money to his name. That can be a problem when the rent comes due. Eddie's downward spiral can be seen in the increasingly sad places he and his wife Kathy called home in Los Angeles.

Bob Blackburn kindly forwarded me a list of addresses supplied by Kathy Wood in a probate deposition. Circa 1954, she and Eddie lived on the 4000 block of Kingswell in Los Angeles, then on Mariposa in Hollywood, then at Lenai Apartments near Warner Bros. at the intersection of Warner Blvd. and Riverside Dr. In the 1960s, they used Ed's G.I. bill money to buy a little house at 6136 Bonner Street in North Hollywood. "Kathy always says that the biggest disappointment in their lives was when they lost [that] house," Bob reports. They closed out the decade at 11250 Tierra in North Hollywood. In the 1970s, they lived at 5617 ½ Strom Ave. in North Hollywood, then finally moved into a grungy apartment at 6383 Yucca in Los Angeles, from which they were ultimately evicted. Along the way, when temporarily homeless, they had to move in with actors Ed knew, including Duke Moore and Peter Coe.

Ed Wood spent the last three decades of his life desperately looking for a home, both literally in Los Angeles County and figuratively within the motion picture industry. The dependable life he'd known on the East Coast was never to be replicated out West. Judging by his movies, "home" was always on Eddie's mind. But he approached this admittedly broad topic in a variety of ways. To simplify matters somewhat, I've divided my findings into a few major categories, starting with the one I consider most important.

Home As Sanctuary

The Old Willows Place

When one thinks of Ed Wood and the theme of "home," one's mind goes directly to Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster (1955). After all, that's the movie with the famous "Home? I have no home!" monologue that gets quoted twice in Tim Burton's Ed Wood  (1994). The sci-fi/horror film casts Lugosi as Dr. Eric Vornoff, an embittered German scientist living in exile in the United States and conducting insidious, Nazi-like experiments in his swamp hideout. He delivers that speech to a duplicitous foreign agent, Strowsky (George Becwar) who has come to bring him back to the Fatherland whether he likes it or not. The scene is notable because it briefly makes the villainous Vornoff a sympathetic character. We learn that Vornoff left behind a wife and child in his native land when he was forced to come to America.

So Lugosi's character abandoned one home but started another, far stranger one in California. Vornoff inhabits a crumbling mansion, "the old Willows place," on secluded Lake Marsh. There, he has formed a very odd surrogate family with two "children": his hulking manservant Lobo (Tor Johnson) and his pet monster, an ill-tempered octopus. Vornoff uses these children to protect the homestead, killing anyone foolish enough to venture onto his property.

But Dr. Eric Vornoff is not the only Wood character to use his home as a fortress. Think back to June (Angela Stevens), the doomed heroine of the made-for-TV production The Sun Was Setting (1951). Deathly ill, she is repeatedly told she will die if she ever leaves her apartment. And sure enough... well, you get the idea.

Arguably, the main characters of Wood's most famous film, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957), are square-jawed pilot Jeff Trent (Greg Walcott) and his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon). Jeff wants to fight off the invading aliens and the zombies, naturally, but his real motivation in the film is protecting his home. Unfortunately, he lives next door to the cemetery the aliens have chosen as their base of operations. Jeff makes a point of telling Paula to lock all the doors in the house. ("I may even lock the side door," she teases.) But one of the zombies (played in tandem by Bela Lugosi and Dr. Tom Mason) enters the house anyway and chases poor Paula into the woods. It's worth noting that Fugitive Girls (1974), a prison-escape movie Wood cowrote for Steve Apostolof, also contains a shocking home invasion scene.

The dialogue in Plan 9 frequently reflects the theme of "home." Lugosi's character, for instance, mourns the death of his wife (Vampira), and narrator Criswell describes the old man's thoughts: "The home they had so long shared together became a tomb." Later, Paula tells Jeff, "This is our home, and nothing's going to take me from it." Even at the end, Criswell warns us that we in the audience may unwittingly pass an alien "on your way home."

The home is a sanctuary for a different reason in Glen Or Glenda (1953): It's the only place where the transvestites in the film can truly be themselves without having to deal with the police or judgmental strangers. "The title of this can only be labeled 'Behind Locked Doors,'" narrator Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) tells us as we see Glen in full drag, happily reading a magazine in his own home. Again, the film's dialogue is peppered with references to the home. Dr. Alton compares men's clothing unfavorably to women's. "At home," the doctor asks, "what does modern man have to look forward to for his body comfort?" He also reminds us that the friendly neighborhood milkman "knows how to find comfort at home."

Home As Private Playground

Ed Wood as Mr. Murphy in Love Feast

That infamous milkman and the other cross-dressers in Glen Or Glenda seem most comfortable when they are at home, but the movie treats their problems seriously. These are not frivolous transvestites who get some sort of cheap, fleeting thrill from wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Instead, the men in the movie wear women's clothing simply to feel comfortable and secure. For the theme of "home as private playground," then, we have to venture into Ed's adult movies of the 1960s and 1970s. There, away from prying eyes, his characters get up to all sorts of naughtiness in their own homes.

Take Mr. Murphy (played by Ed Wood himself) in the Joe Robertson-directed Love Feast (1969). This white-suited old sot is a shameless pervert who essentially turns his own home into a makeshift brothel. His scam is outrageous: He searches the Yellow Pages for modeling agencies, has them send over attractive young ladies, then persuades these women to disrobe and join him in an orgy. This is the kind of behavior society at large might frown upon, but Murphy gets away with it because he does this all within the confines of his own home. Maybe he never leaves the place. He doesn't seem like the type who ventures far from his base of operations.

Wood himself directed Necromania: A Tale Of Weird Love (1971), a pornographic feature that seems to take place almost entirely within the confines of a private residence, in this case the home of mysterious "necromancer" Madam Heles (Maria Arnold). Danny (Ric Lutze) and Shirley (Rene Bond) are just weekend visitors, but Madam Heles and her assistants live there, devoting their lives to some kind of pseudo-religious sex cult. It's also suggested that the house is inhabited by sex addicts who engage in a nonstop orgy every day. Like the heroine of The Sun Was Setting, they cannot function in the outside world anymore.

And then there is Wood's The Young Marrieds (1972), in which frustrated Ben (Louis Wolf) cajoles his supposedly frigid wife Ginny (Alice Friedland) into various kinky capers at home, including posing for nude photographs. They also experiment with dirty talk and light S&M. Yet again, what makes this possible is that they are in the confines of their own home. But that's nothing compared to what goes on during the film's last third. Ben and Ginny attend a full-fledged orgy at the home of one of Ben's coworkers. The whole point of the movie is that these are not deviates operating on the fringe of society; they're just normal people looking for some fun. They could be your next-door neighbors, the film implies.

Home As Battleground

A tale of domestic misery.

Plan 9's Jeff and Paula aside, there aren't too many happily married couples or functional families in the Wood canon. The homes in Wood's movies are often under assault from outside forces, it's true, but they are just as likely to be torn asunder by internal tensions as well. Wood specialized in depicting domestic turmoil in his movies. It starts with his debut feature, the aforementioned Glen Or Glenda. The title character's own boyhood home was fraught with tension, we learn, since Mother wanted a girl instead and Father showed nothing but disdain and disappointment for the child. We overhear one of their arguments about whether Glen should be allowed to wear a dress for a costume party.

There is further unpleasantness when Glen's snooty sister Sheila (Evelyn Wood, no relation) comes home and is shocked to find her brother dressed as a woman. "Suppose I were to come home with Roy or one of my other boyfriends some night," she complains to a coworker, "and find Glen like I did last night?" This scene is mirrored by a flashback sequence in which Glen's friend Johnny (Charles Crafts) is caught in drag by his wife at their home. Even Glen's domestic scenes with his fiancee Barbara (Dolores Fuller) are tense, namely because Glen doesn't know how to confess his transvestism to her, even though she suspects something is dreadfully wrong.

Wood's crime thriller Jail Bait (1954) is also about a family under siege. The matriarch of the family has died, so it's up to the elderly patriarch, Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson) and his grown daughter Marilyn (Fuller, again) to keep the household together. Unfortunately, young, impetuous Don Gregor (Clancy Malone) has taken up with criminals and is on his way to either prison or an early death. Much of Jail Bait takes place in the Gregor family living room, where Don, Marilyn, and the doctor engage in soap opera-style arguments. The film has a parallel household, consisting of gangster Vic Brady (Farrell, again) and his gun moll Loretta (Theodora Thurman). Life here is unhappy as well, with bad-tempered Vic constantly snapping at Loretta, who unwisely remains loyal to this skunk.

As reader Milton Knight points out, via Facebook, the Wood-scripted The Violent Years (1956) is all about domestic turmoil, as teenager Paula (Jean Moorhead) runs afoul of the law, despite coming from a well-to-do family. Ultimately, when Paula is brought before the court, her problem is diagnosed as the lack of a "proper home."

And there is plenty of domestic misery to be found in the films that Wood made with Stephen C. Apostolof. Characters in The Cocktail Hostesses (1973) and The Class Reunion (1972) refer to their own failing marriages, and they attempt to numb themselves with sex and alcohol. But for the definitive Wood/Apostolof statement on the theme of "home," one must watch Drop Out Wife (1972). This is the story of Peggy (Angela Carnon), a wife and mother (with two children) who decides to abandon her family and live as a swinger, having numerous sexual encounters with strangers. In a flashback, we learn that Peggy was pregnant with her third child when her husband Jim (Chris Geoffries) slapped her across the face during an argument, knocking her to the ground. The baby was stillborn. This horrific scene actually happens in the family's kitchen, which should be the heart of any home. In the end, Peggy becomes disenchanted with her free-and-easy new lifestyle and makes a desperate gambit to get her family back.

Domesticity may not be perfect, suggests Ed Wood, but it beats any alternative.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Glen or Glenda Odyssey, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

Even in death, Ed Wood managed to get bad reviews.

Snips and Snails

You know the story: The Medved brothers' The Golden Turkey Awards was published in 1980, a few years after Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s passing. The book cited Plan 9 from Outer Space and Wood as, respectively, the "worst" film ever made by the "worst" director of all time. The "so bad it's good" cult film phenomenon didn't start there, but for Wood, it posthumously resurrected his career (shades of Plan 9). Paramount Studios, apparently smelling blood in the water, picked up the rights to Glen or Glenda in 1981 in the wake of Ed's crowning as schlock auteur par excellence.

Viewpoints on Ed and his work continue to morph over time. In this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays, we're taking a literal snapshot of the life of the inestimable cultural artifact that is Ed Wood's epic Glen or Glenda—I'm dead serious—at an unfortunate point in time in Woodology, yet arguably a point without which having occurred there'd be no Woodology today. 

As reviews and news articles show, the early '80s relaunch of Glenda didn't go as Paramount had planned. I snipped a few newspaper clippings from then, of a consistent and cynical viewpoint. The quoting of (ludicrous) lines that don't even appear in Glen or Glenda really pisses me off! It's also instructive to see how Glenda played elsewhere, the Aussies reveling in the "bad" movie viewpoint then in vast majority, while going far beyond in decrying the film for its cringe-worthy stereotyping. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 65: The 'Glen or Glenda' Transcript

Ed Wood and Dolores Fuller share a tender moment in Glen Or Glenda.

Here's what made this project possible.

Greg Dziawer, that tireless chronicler of all things Ed Wood, is taking a much-deserved week off. So no new "Orbit" or "Odyssey" from him today. He will return next week with more fascinating findings. In the meanwhile, as a poor but ready substitute, I offer a vintage document from my own archives, one that dates back nearly 20 years. Apparently, back in June 1997, I was whiling away the summer days by painstakingly transcribing my VHS copy of Glen Or Glenda from Rhino Home Video. Ah, youth! On the road to ruin! May it ever be so adventurous! 

If I really concentrate, I can even remember exactly how the transcription process went. I recorded the audio from my TV directly onto a boombox with a dual cassette deck. Back then, I had a cassette adapter that could plug directly into the headphone jack on my TV. I took the resulting recording and played it back on my trusty Aiwa Super Bass stereo radio cassette player. (Essentially a Walkman.) The Aiwa did not have a pause button, so I'd play a few seconds, STOP, type what I'd heard, REWIND, play a few more seconds, STOP, etc. Even with a relatively brief movie like Glen or Glenda, this was a slow, arduous task. I was inspired in this madness by a similar transcript of Monty Python and the Holy Grail that had been floating around cyberspace in the early to mid-1990s.

You have to remember, this was in the very primitive days of the internet. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, and even Google were still in the future when I started. The Internet Movie Database, Amazon, and Ebay existed but were relatively primitive. Instead, my online life revolved around text-based Usenet newsgroups. There was even one called alt.fan.ed-wood. Like most Usenet groups, it's all spam and garbage now. Twenty years ago, however, it was actually home to a small but fervent community of Ed Wood fans, trading what little information was available to us in that benighted era. And it was there that I first posted the transcript you are now (hopefully) about to read.

I vouch for the accuracy of none of this. The formatting is atrocious and inconsistent. I'm sure this document is riddled with errors of all kinds. But maybe, just maybe, you will find it an interesting keepsake from a bygone epoch of Ed Wood fandom. Since it's based on the Rhino edition of the film, it contains a few scraps of dialogue that do not appear in the current DVD version. This material is denoted in RED type.

Enjoy with my compliments.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The 'Glen Or Glenda' Odyssey, Part One by Greg Dziawer

These posters weren't exactly subtle about what inspired Ed's movie.

"A lady is a lady, whatever the case may be."

-Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) in Glen Or Glenda

Christine Jorgensen holds the Daily News.

Born just a year and half after Ed Wood, only in the Bronx instead of Poughkeepsie, George Williamson Jorgensen likewise enlisted in the military in his late teens, having been drafted shortly after graduating high school in 1945. By 1946, both discharged, Ed began pursuing the creative life while George began pursuing Christine.

Finally, after knocking around Hollywood for a half dozen years, Ed landed his big break. A feature. And even better, impossibly, a feature about a subject through which he could Trojan Horse his own story, a plea for transvestism. We all know that's Glen or Glenda, but the rapid-fire sequence of events in getting the film to market is worth mentioning. It's even worth opening a new Odyssey, and sharing a key document that, already in early 1953, months before Glen or Glenda was even released, reveals Ed's awareness as Outside Artist.

"EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY": That Daily News headline from December 1, 1952 started it all, launching Christine Jorgensen into the staid 1950s, where she remained celebrated and, owing to her class and wit, rarely derided. Her return to the United States from Sweden, landing at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in Queens—the busiest international air passenger gateway in the US at the time—was the largest press gathering to date. She was, for a spell, arguably the most famous woman in the world.



Beating just about everyone to the punch, low-budget exploitation film producer George Weiss hired a hungry young Ed Wood to write and direct Glen or Glenda, a film intended to cash in on the Christine Jorgensen case, in early 1953. Although Wood veered far from the nominal source, he turned the assignment quickly, which was all that mattered. Inside of a week from the time that Christine landed in the States, this newspaper article credited to UPI correspondent Aline Mosby was already in syndication. The following clipping originally appeared in the February 19, 1953 edition of the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah.

"A sort of Orson Welles of low-budget pictures."

As much as I'd like to comment
...on this unbelievably early tie of Ed to Orson Welles, as kindred maverick artists by implication, as well as this early recognition of Welles' ultimate place in film history
...on the "tiny studio"
...on Ed and Martha Graham
I'll try to stop and let it speak for itself. Weiss clearly managed quick placement of a promotional piece, the content clearly provided almost if not entirely by Ed. It makes it his first (perhaps only) nationally syndicated newspaper interview.

By April, Glen or Glenda premiered across drive-ins and hardtop fleapits, adopting different titles for different regions. It continued playing these venues for a full decade.

Christine Jorgensen remained a staple of the pop culture throughout the 1950s, appearing in men's adventure magazines (interesting to imagine the average joe's reaction), as spokesperson for the transgendered and belatedly as subject of her own movie bio. She died in 1989 at the age of 62, felled by bladder and lung cancer.

As for Ed, we'll explore more in future Ed Wood Wednesdays!

Special Thanks: The scan of the article above is from The Scene Of Screen 13, a blog where you will additionally find a ton of Ed-related movie ads in local papers, and a veritable mountain of ads from the world of ex- and sexploitation during Ed's era. And for more about Christine Jorgensen, make sure to check out the Ed Wood Wednesdays Tumblr.

Ed Wood Extra! The arrival of Lots #3028 and #3043

Here I am with my new Ed Wood poster, bathed in the greenish fluorescent glow of my small kitchen.

This poster caused me so much grief.

Chalk up one more thing Ed Wood and I have in common. Eddie suffered for his art. And I, too, have suffered for Ed Wood's art, though not for the reasons you might be imagining.

While making my way through, let's say, the '70s softcore romps Eddie wrote for Steve Apostolof involved a certain amount of tedium, I cannot say that Wood's work has inspired in me the same kind of theatrical agony it seems to have caused other observers. No, my suffering has been of a different stripe.

Since Ed Wood Wednesdays began back in July 2013, I have essentially been an indentured servant to a man who died nearly 40 years ago. In my quest to catalog the life and career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr., I have frequently forsaken such niceties as fresh air, exercise, and sleep. The sun may shine and the birds may chirp, after all, but this DVD of The Undergraduate isn't going to review itself! Like Mark Borchardt said in American Movie: "I have to adhere to this keyboard."

Conservatively, I'd estimate I've put on 15 to 20 pounds in the time I've been writing Ed Wood Wednesdays. I chalk it up to all those hours I've spent hunched over my laptop computer, keeping my energy up with a steady intake of frozen dinners and prepackaged snacks. Hey, Eddie got a little doughy near the end, too. That's yet another thing we have in common, except his weight gain came from booze while mine came from gummi worms and microwaved pizza.

And sometimes, this project has inconvenienced me in such silly ways that all I can do is laugh. Take today, for instance. You'll remember, a few weeks ago, that there was a massive auction of Ed Wood memorabilia. I chickened out on the big ticket items, including a suitcase and two trunks owned by Eddie himself, but I wanted to get something out of the auction so I bid on a few of the smaller items. I wound up winning two of these: a vintage one-sheet poster for Glen or Glenda? under the alternate title I Led 2 Lives (Lot #3028) and a set of eight Mexican lobby cards for Plan 9 from Outer Space (Lot #3043).

Today, they are in my possession at last, and getting them into my apartment was a Sisyphean ordeal. It should have been easy. FedEx was scheduled to deliver them yesterday, but I knew I'd be at work when they arrived so I arranged to have Patricia, the lovely lady who manages the office of the apartment complex where I live, sign for them in my absence. My apartment, I should say, is literally next door to this office. We share a wall.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. My landlady happened to be dropping by the office when the FedEx guy arrived, and she prevented Patricia from signing for the package, reasoning that if they performed this simple kindness for me, a loyal rent-payer for 12 years, they'd have to do the same for everyone. My landlady, I can say from experience, is not someone with whom you can bargain... or reason.

One of my nifty new lobby cards.

Meanwhile, of course, my package could not be delivered as instructed. So back to the FedEx pickup center it went. Luckily, this is less than a quarter-mile from my home, since I live in a busy commercial district dominated by strip malls, chain stores, and gas stations. The clerk there was only too happy to turn over my Ed Wood poster and lobby cards to me.

But here is where the story turns into a Buster Keaton comedy. RR Auction sent these items in one large, flat cardboard box, and there was no way of fitting this into my cramped 2002 Chevy Cavalier. I tried every configuration I could imagine. Seats all the way forward. Seats all the way back. Passenger seat tilted as flat as it would go. Windows open. Trunk open. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked.

Here I was, stranded in the FedEx parking lot just a few minutes away from my apartment. I thought of temporarily ditching the car and just walking the damned thing back home. But, again, this is a busy commercial district, and my story was happening during rush hour traffic. How was I ever going to get across those busy, dangerous streets with this ridiculous cardboard box? If I held it in front of me, I couldn't even see the traffic coming.

In desperation, I dragged the package back into the FedEx place and asked if I could just open it there and take the contents out. The lady behind the desk said this was fine, so I borrowed her scissors and cut into the package. And what tumbled out? More styrofoam packing peanuts than I have ever seen in my life. Dozens and dozens of the goddamned things accumulated at my feet. Mortified, I spent a good (read: bad) 10 to 15 minutes crawling around the floor of the FedEx pickup center in a frantic effort to retrieve every last one of those peanuts. The place looked nicer than my apartment, after all, and I didn't want to muck it up.

Eventually, though, I did manage to extract my purchases and get them into my battered, grungy old car. The Glen or Glenda? poster was swaddled in about eight miles of bubble wrap, so it was still quite a large item even outside of its cardboard cocoon. But at least it was now flexible enough to be (barely) wedged into the nearly-nonexistent back seat of my vehicle. I couldn't see a damned thing out the rear window, but then again, I didn't have far to drive. It wasn't 100% safe, but it was safe enough.

Once I got back home, I had a devil of a time chasing after all the additional styrofoam peanuts that were falling everywhere. I'm kind of a zealot about littering, especially in my own neighborhood, so I didn't want to just leave a trail of those tell-tale peanuts outside the apartment complex where I live. It was a windy day, though, so this was tricky to say the least. I'm sure I lost a few soldiers today.

And now? Well, now the poster and the lobby cards are safely ensconced in my apartment. And you know what else? They're really lovely. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but they're lovely nonetheless.

The Glenda poster is larger than I was imagining, the size of a small (admittedly very wide and flat) child, and still a satisfying shade of fire-engine red. Right now, still wrapped in plastic, it's leaning against the wall of my kitchen. I'll probably have it framed soon, but I think the kitchen is a good place for it. Much of Glen or Glenda? takes place in kitchens. Even Lugosi's lab where he creates life is a kind of kitchen. Every morning when I have my bowl of cereal, I can look up at Eddie smooching with Dolores Fuller, forever preserved in their 1953 glory. That's a nice thought.

The lobby cards came in a thick, heavy binder of their own. I might just leave them that way. To be honest, I haven't given much thought to the items themselves. I've barely even looked at 'em. For now, I'm just happy they're home.

POSTSCRIPT: In my Clouseau-esque struggles to get the uncooperative poster and lobby cards into my vehicle on Wednesday, I somehow managed to injure my left leg rather badly. By Thursday, that leg was noticeably bruised and achy, making it difficult to walk. For the last two days, then, I have been limping to and from work. Now that I am at last in repose, attempting to recuperate over the weekend, the medicinal smell of a cheap, over-the-counter topical ointment is stinging my nostrils. So when I say I have suffered for Ed Wood's art, I mean it quite literally.