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.)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 251: The last footage of Bela Lugosi

A scowling Bela Lugosi made his last onscreen appearance in Plan 9.

It's one of the most famous anecdotes in the life of Edward D. Wood, Jr. It could even be the linchpin of the entire Wood saga, the source of much of Eddie's mystique. According to legend, the director took a few minutes of footage of a dead actor and built a whole movie around it—not just any movie, either, but an infamous movie! If you've seen the Tim Burton-directed biopic from 1994, it's a story you already know well. But how much of it is the truth? Let's talk about it.

"This is the acorn."

When legendary Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi died in August 1956 at the age of 73, director Ed Wood was devastated. Not only had he lost a good friend, he'd lost his leading man. Bela had starred in Glen or Glenda (1953) and Bride of the Monster (1955) for Eddie and was supposed to star in numerous upcoming Wood productions, like The Ghoul Goes West and The Vampire's Tomb. Now those plans were permanently canceled.

But Eddie had an ace up his sleeve: a reel of silent test footage he'd shot of Bela Lugosi shortly before the great man's death. Sure, it was only a few minutes of film and it didn't really tell much of a story, but Ed Wood still felt it could be the starting point for a feature-length motion picture. As Johnny Depp puts it in the Tim Burton film: "This is the acorn that will grow a great oak." Eddie's plan was to film a bunch of new scenes and extend Bela's role through the use of a carefully-disguised body double. 

The amazing thing is that Ed Wood actually carried out this seemingly insane plan. The result was a completely bonkers sci-fi/horror hybrid called Graverobbers from Outer Space, which premiered in Hollywood on March 15, 1957. It was later retitled Plan 9 from Outer Space and eventually gained a reputation as the worst movie ever made, thanks to coverage in various sci-fi/horror fan magazines and the book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980). It is, hands down, the most famous project Ed Wood was ever involved in.