Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 177: The Erotic Spy (1968)

There's just something about those 1960s spy stories.

Ian Fleming could scarcely have known what he was unleashing on the world when he wrote Casino Royale (1953), the first of his twelve novels about suave British superspy James Bond. Though hardly fiction's first secret agent, it was 007 who established the template that so many after him would follow. The first big-screen Bond adaptation, Dr. No starring Sean Connery, appeared in 1962. The phenomenal success of that film and its many sequels, especially Goldfinger (1964), cemented Bond's fame and inspired countless imitations, knockoffs, and wannabes. 

"A secret service thriller."

All of popular culture came down with a serious case of Bondmania in the 1960s. And why not? Cold War tensions were running high. (Is it a coincidence that the first Bond film came out the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis?) Spies were simply everywhere—movie theaters, TV screens, toyboxes, bookshelves, our dreams, etc. There was no escape from car chases, gimmicky weapons, top-secret missions, boastful villains, hulking henchmen, and sexy female double agents. Even on pop radio, you could hear Johnny Rivers crooning about that poor "secret agent man" who traded in his name for a number. The great thing about Bond-inspired spy stories is that they could range from silly to serious and could be tailored to any age group.

Did you think the adult publishing industry would ignore this trend? Ha! In 1968, Bernie Bloom's Pendulum Publishing released a photo-illustrated novella called The Erotic Spy. This was another of the company's Pendulum Pictorials, which falsely claimed to be "novelizations" of feature films. Instead, they contained staged, mostly black-and-white photos accompanied by text. There were six of these Pictorials altogether, all released in 1968. The Erotic Spy was the third of them. It retailed for $1.75, which is over fifteen bucks in today's money.

Since the first two Pendulum Pictorials were credited to our very own Edward Davis Wood, Jr., it's reasonable to assume that Eddie may have written the other four under fake names. Notice that I said assume and may; we're not talking about certainties here, just probabilities. 

Officially, The Erotic Spy is credited to Abbott Smith, an author with zero other credits. I doubt he's George Abbott-Smith, who wrote A Manual Greek Lexicon of the Old Testament in 1923. For one thing, George died in 1947. According to reader Shawn D. Langrick, at the time of this book's publication, a man named Abbott Smith happened to be the Acting Chairman of the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. Shawn speculates that the credited author's name may have been an "inside joke."

But does The Erotic Spy seem like Ed Wood's work? Let's investigate.

What we have here are the adventures of Dick Wilson—and, yeah, our hero is blatantly named after the appendage he uses the most—who works for a government agency called GSS in Washington D.C. Dick's boss (the equivalent of M in the Bond films) is a guy named Kip Arlington, and his partner is a sexy brunette rookie named Ann Barnes. Naturally, in addition to their professional relationship, Dick and Ann have an intense sexual affair that Kip neither condones nor condemns. And they all work out of a three-story brick building that also contains a ladies' dress shop, a shoe repair shop, and a dry cleaning place, all of which operate as legitimate businesses.

A story like this obviously needs a major crisis, and, boy, does The Erotic Spy have one! Briefly, a mysterious but widely-feared foreign agent known only as Gold Girl has purloined a valuable and potentially dangerous item known as the Golden Rooster. And what is that? Well, on his deathbed, an eccentric nuclear physicist named Dr. Harvey Malcolm created a "deceptively simple" formula for "producing a controlled thermo-nuclear reaction" and wrote it on a sheet of vellum, which he then placed inside a lead cylinder. Surprisingly active for a dying man, Dr. Malcolm hid the cylinder inside a gilded plaster figurine of a rooster ("an ordinary chicken-type rooster," the book specifies). And now, the so-called Golden Rooster has been stolen from the Bureau of Standards, and it's up to Dick Wilson to retrieve it.

The Golden Rooster is such an absurdly contrived plot device that it almost serves as a self-aware parody of the MacGuffin, i.e. the object that drives the story but is otherwise worthless. We care about this item only because the characters care about it. It's the thing everyone wants for some reason. One of the most famous MacGuffins in movie history is the titular object in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). Like the Golden Rooster, it's a statue of a bird. I'm confident that The Erotic Spy is directly referencing the Huston film in a knowingly silly way.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 176: Bye Bye Broadie (1968)

You'd never guess the plot of this book by its cover. Or its title, for that matter.

In the turbulent year of 1968, Los Angeles adult publishing giant Pendulum launched a series of highly unusual books it called Pendulum Pictorials. Listing for $1.75 apiece, these volumes interspersed text and photos to tell wild, action-packed stories rife with sex and sadism. The publisher claimed that the Pictorials were adaptations of feature films, but the (black-and-white) photos in them were obviously staged and the alleged movies did not exist.

Mrs. Grundy closes in for the kill.

In all, six Pendulum Pictorials came out that year. Two of those, Bye Bye Broadie and Raped in the Grass, were credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr., Pendulum's best-known and most prolific author. As for the other four, I highly suspect that Eddie either wrote or cowrote these under assumed names. While some Woodologists disagree—even getting testy about it—the authorship of Broadie and Raped is undisputed. All you have to do is look at the covers.

I've had the text from the Pendulum Pictorials for a while now, but I never felt like I could review these books fairly until I saw the photographs that were supposed to accompany the words. Recently, reader Dennis Smithers, Jr. kindly shared with me the images from Bye Bye Broadie, the first book in the Pendulum Pictorials series and one of the strangest erotic works I have encountered anywhere. So now is the time to talk about it.

Folks, this is one inexplicable book, even in the topsy-turvy world of Ed Wood. Let's start with the title, apparently a pun on the 1960 stage musical and 1963 film Bye Bye Birdie.  Whatever its inspiration may be, the name Bye Bye Broadie does not describe any aspect of Wood's story, nor are there any obvious or hidden parallels between Birdie and Broadie, apart from the fact that they both feature characters who are school-age girls. Never is the word "broad," let alone "broadie," uttered by any character. Meanwhile, the cover photo is so generic—merely a man and woman embracing on a lawn—that the prospective customer would have no idea what he was getting for his $1.75.

So what did readers get from Bye Bye Broadie, apart from the "80 photos" promised by the cover?

Well, what we have here is the surreal, almost free-associative story of an unnamed peeper and self-admitted rapist who spies on the students at an all-girl boarding school owned by the man-hating Mrs. Grundy. This is the kind of school where the students regularly enjoy frolicking semi-nude on the front lawn and are not discouraged from doing so. In other words, this place could only exist in the imaginations of horny middle-aged men. Male staff members typically only last a week or so, for reasons you might imagine.

The book's story focuses on four eager young pupils: Joni, Barbee, Mary, and (you guessed it) Shirley. When the shirtless peeper approaches the girls in the middle of some topless roughhousing, they respond too eagerly to his advances and begin erotically mauling him. The overwhelmed man can hardly breathe. Remember the female-on-male gang rape scenes from The Violent Years (1956) and Fugitive Girls (1974)? Ed Wood must have spent some time dwelling on scenarios like that.

Suddenly, old Mrs. Grundy shows up and bludgeons the intruder to death with her cane. She then forces her students to help her dispose of the body in a nearby pet cemetery. She says that if the girls don't help, she'll write "toilet letters" to their parents, disclosing all of their bad deeds. Then things really get strange, not to mention supernatural! Not to spoil too much, but the girls may have buried the peeper prematurely. The ending reminded me a bit of the shocking final scene from Carrie (1976), with a bloody hand reaching up from the grave.

Similar moments from Bye Bye Broadie (left) and Carrie (right).

To pad out the narrative, Ed Wood employs a technique he has used elsewhere in his writing, such as the 1972 novel The Only House. Namely, he gives all the characters—the peeper, Mrs. Grundy, and all four schoolgirls—lengthy flashbacks and/or internal monologues that interrupt the main story for pages at a time. Without these frequent asides, the plot of Bye Bye Broadie would be thin indeed. As it is, Eddie takes the time to really get to know his six characters. Some of this material feels like it may have been plundered from other stories or even unfinished novels that Ed was working on at the time.

Perhaps the most egregious padding involves the character Barbee. We are told that she worked as a nurses' aid at a local hospital over the summer. Because of her medical training, it is her responsibility to determine that the peeper is actually dead after Mrs. Grundy's initial attack. Later, we are told about her previous relationship with a "young doctor" that quickly took a turn into S&M territory, with the man asserting his dominance over Barbee. None of this material fits comfortably into Bye Bye Broadie, particularly the detail that Barbee had "a small apartment in a rough section of town." Isn't she supposed to be a teenage girl who lives at the school? This entire flashback seems to have been airlifted in from another story entirely.

Some of the flashbacks are more germane to the story, especially the passages related to Mrs. Grundy. We learn about what the headmistress' childhood was like, how she came to hate men, and what happened to the late Mr. Grundy. It's all quite interesting, though hardly erotic. And then there is the story of Shirley and her first fateful sexual encounter in the Texas badlands. Shirley's flashback bears a remarkable resemblance to the incident that starts the novel Sex Salvation (1975), with her young paramour being bitten by a rattlesnake. It's also worth noting that Shirley is Bye Bye Broadie's resident angora enthusiast. (It had to be someone.)

Even if Ed's name were not on the cover, Bye Bye Broadie would be easy to identify as his work. This is Wood at his Woodiest, wallowing in all four of his major obsessions: sex, death, booze, and women's clothing. His trademark ellipses are here in force, as are many of his favorite words, like "lovely," "youthful," "lowered," "thrill," "jollies," "soft," and "pink." Best of all, Eddie does not let things like coherence, plausibility, or continuity get in his way. As I indicated earlier, he veers away from the main storyline whenever he damned well feels like it. If you like your Ed Wood unrestrained—and I do—Bye Bye Broadie is your kind of book. My only caveats are the casual references to rape and the implied pedophilia (the schoolgirls are called "little more than kids"), but Ed gets these out of the way early in the story.

The peeper is buried, but only up to his neck.

So that's the textual portion of the book. But what about the visual portion? Having now seen the pictures from Bye Bye Broadie, I have to ask that old chicken-and-egg question about which came first. For a project like this, I guess it makes more sense to take the pictures first and then have a writer base a story on them, but how did anyone think to take these particular photos without at least an outline as a starting point?

We start out fairly normally, with some generic-looking snapshots of an ordinary, dark-haired guy canoodling with some vaguely hippie-ish, half-undressed young women in some sunny outdoor setting. There is nothing to suggest that the man is a desperate rapist, nor is it obvious that the women are supposed to be students or that any of this is happening at a school. The women appear to be in their early-to-mid-twenties, well past their boarding school years.

Then Mrs. Grundy shows up and starts walloping everyone in sight with her cane. The photographer makes a point to keep the headmistress' face out of frame or in shadows, so we never get a good look at her. This is definitely for the best, since Ed's text makes such a point of how homely and sexually unappealing the character is. For all I know, it may be a man in drag portraying Mrs. Grundy. The girls are supposed to react with utter horror at the headmistress' violent outburst, but the models are often seen laughing and smiling in these pictures.

I should point out that the photographs in Bye Bye Broadie are pretty sparing in their use of nudity. We see some bare breasts and bottoms but no genitals. And there is no male nudity whatsoever, let alone any explicit sex. If this were a movie (and the book's introduction claims Broadie is being made by a nonexistent company called Image 4), it would likely get an R rating. Even Ed's text is cleaner than usual, avoiding most of the harsh profanities that appear in his adult work.

As the story progresses, we get some photographs of the girls carrying the peeper's body around. He does not look dead so much as dazed. His eyes are wide open in some shots and closed in others. The photographer has bothered to slather some stage blood on the man's face and chest. How this is supposed to arouse the reader, I have no idea. Eventually, they throw him into a pit and bury him up to his neck. This basically aligns with Ed Wood's text, as does the peeper's unexpected revival. Once again, the girls look more amused than horrified. They all seem to be having fun on a nice, sunny afternoon.

The Pendulum Pictorials experiment was brief. Six books were released in 1968, but the series does not seem to have continued after that. I'm not sure if they were a commercial success or not. It seems like, if these titles had been big moneymakers, publisher Bernie Bloom would have kept making them. If so, Ed Wood would have certainly been a major part of the franchise. Do you think it's possible that Eddie himself was somehow involved in the Bye Bye Broadie photoshoot, even "directing" it as if he were making a real movie? That's quite an intriguing thought. 

 

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Orbit, Part 4 by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg goes looking for Ed Wood in a magazine from 1969.

The cover of this issue.

When I was in high school, I played volleyball. Although I went to a small rural school, we were very competitive, winning a few of the bigger tournaments in the region. We once even played the Canadian Junior National Team round-robin and split two games with them.

Alas, we played clothed. At that point, I was likely still unaware of the storied history of nude volleyball. Not so the author of an article on nudism in the January/February 1969 issue of Body & Soul, a sex magazine put out by Pendulum Publishers, Inc. This particular publication hailed from Pendulum's newly minted West Coast office, incorporated by Bernie Bloom in the spring of 1968. Bernie immediately hired his old crony Ed Wood, with whom he'd previously worked at Golden State News.

While Eddie's name appears nowhere throughout the issue of Body & Soul, I wondered while looking through it whether any of the text could have been written by him. At this point, there's relatively scant text compared to a typical Pendulum title of a few years later. The issue contains just the aforementioned nudism article and a single brief piece of fiction clearly credited to a pseudonym. The only other words in the issue are those accompanying the plethora of photo features. These pictorials feature solo women in open-legged or "split beaver" poses and are on the cusp of hardcore pornography. (A typical caption reads: "She's a girl who's always willing to extend herself for a friend.") Beyond that, we also get a few ads, obviously placed by the publisher, as well as an editorial.

Here is a sampling of this Body & Soul material. I'll defer my opinion about Ed's possible involvement and let you decide for yourself.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Promo Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood was in the director's chair for 1971's Necromania.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Woodologist Odyssey, Part Three by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg takes us on a trivial pursuit.

It's time once again to turn our attention to Woodologists, i.e. those super-devoted Ed Wood experts who transcend mere fandom. In the past, I've quizzed author James Pontolillo and filmmaker Keith Crocker. This week, though, the person I want to quiz is you! 

That's right. I want to see how much you know about Edward D. Wood, Jr. and his various personal and professional associates. See if you can answer the following ten questions. If you can, you're seriously obsessed!

So how'd you do? Was this a breeze or were you utterly baffled? 

BONUS QUESTION: For which group did Eddie briefly serve as a chaplain after the war? 

I'll answer these questions and many more you never thought to ask in future installments of this series.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Loop Odyssey, Part 14 by Greg Dziawer

This week's film has that touch of mink.

As the 1970s wore on, hardcore pornography deepened its roots as a mass cultural object. This was a pioneering era that can never be replicated. We know now, more than ever, just how active Edward D. Wood, Jr. was in the sex film industry during these crucial years. And although we have a great deal more to learn, it's widely accepted that Ed played a role—multiple roles, really—in the production of 8mm silent porn loops.

The SE logo as it looked in 1978.

More than any other, the brand that led the charge of pornography into America's bedrooms was Swedish Erotica. I'll refrain from repeating myself and instead direct you back to previous articles in which I've obsessed over the ephemeral details in these short erotic films. Swedish Erotica loops were marketed directly to consumers rather than theaters or arcades. You had to supply your own projector and screen, and the films originally lacked sound, but at least you could watch them in the privacy of your own home.

Until the late 1970s, Ed Wood worked for a company called Art Publishers, Inc, which released Swedish Erotica films and tie-in magazines. The company was run by Noel Bloom, son of porn publisher Bernie Bloom. A decade earlier, Bernie had hired Ed to work in the West Coast office of Pendulum Publishers, Inc., which initially specialized in adult magazines and paperbacks. When Noel began producing adult loops in the early 1970s, he naturally recruited old pro Ed Wood to work on them.

The Swedish Erotica loop series arguably peaked in 1978. Well over a hundred loops were released to the home market that year. Ed passed in December of that year, but he had been penning subtitles for Bloom-family loops at least as far back as 1972, and he continued receiving paychecks from Art Publishers, Inc right into the final year of his life.

I've been transcribing the subtitles from dozens of loops for the last few years. These subtitles are odd throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive era of cinema, almost like the intertitles from silent movies. I've increasingly come to believe that the subtitles for the Bloom-family loops were written by Ed Wood himself. He likely wrote box cover summaries and even loop titles as well.

And that brings us to our next specimen: Swedish Erotica loop #146: "Blond Mink." This film, released near the end of Ed Wood's life, may not feature the most stellar set of subtitles I've come across, but it deserves some attention nevertheless.

The loop begins with a title card and credits. Three crew members are listed, but their names are different from those credited in earlier Swedish Erotica loops. A rather straightforward sex scene then ensues. Prolific porn performer Paul Thomas, a talented adult director in his later years, stars alongside blonde-haired Sindee Moore, who appears here without her usual colorful neck scarf. While the earliest Swedish Erotica loops developed narratives and characters and were shot with a careful artistry, those pretenses had almost completely evaporated by 1978. In "Blond Mink," the guy simply shows up at the girl's place, and they immediately get it on. Strangely, though, one last pretense was hanging on by its fingertips—the subtitles.

We are getting close to the end of the subtitled loops by Swedish Erotica #146, and the evolution of the subtitles through the mid-'70s mirrors the evolution of the narratives and artistry. The subtitles are so superfluous by 1978 that their existence seems utterly unnecessary. You'll see what I mean as you read the following transcript.

BLOND MINK 

Guy: YOU LOOK GOOD. 

Guy: GIVE ME YOUR TONGUE. 

Girl: OHHHHHH...GOD... 

Girl: FILL ME WITH YOUR TONGUE.

A pair of mink stoles.

That's it—a measly 14 words spread across four lines, totaling about ten seconds of screen time during this seven-and-a-half-minute loop. Incredibly, the last line appears while Paul and Sindee are still engaged in oral foreplay, loooooong before the loop's literal climax. In the earlier Swedish Erotica loops, that moment would have been accompanied by plenty of panting UMM's, OHHHH's, and AHH's. 

For those keeping score, "Blond Mink" has an average of 3.5 words per line. It's not the lowest average I've seen (that's 2.6), but by far, it's the least number of lines. As with other latter-day Swedish Erotica loops, the subtitles appear fittingly in purple.

Why even bother with the subs at this point? Old habits die hard, apparently. The subtitles died, too, roughly around the same time Ed passed. It's plausible that this is his work, but the text is so scant that there's too little evidence of Ed's unorthodox, highly distinctive writing style. That said, we do have two ellipses in the third subtitled line, punctuation oft-employed by Ed. And in 14 words, "tongue" appears twice. Ed's adult paperbacks and magazine short stories are rife with slashing, piercing, and darting tongues, either when his characters are kissing or when (as here) they're engaged in oral sex. The OHHHHHH, meanwhile, is just exemplary.

The title, too—and I'm again suggesting it was likely Ed's invention—is productive to interrogate. Knowing Ed's penchant for grammatical errors, I first thought it odd to see the word BLOND without an E. Upon further study, used as an adjective, Ed may have been right to utilize the masculine form of the word, especially in the United States. 

And then we come to the word MINK. Minks are carnivorous mammals related to otters, weasels and ferrets. We know them best for their fur. I have two of my grandmother's mink stoles, the old-fashioned kind with the heads still on, in my attic right now.

The blonde—the word is feminine if used as a noun and generally derogative—does, in fact, eat meat in the film, so perhaps being carnivorous is the reference. Given his angora affliction, it's also possible that Ed Wood had fur on the brain. Somehow, though, I don't think so. In one of his blond(e) moments, Eddie seemingly confounded "mink" and "minx." 

Urban Dictionary defines a minx as "an alluring, cunning, or boldly flirtatious girl or young woman. [She] has unusual seductive powers such that she could commit acts that would otherwise be considered inappropriate, while still maintaining an air of class or poise." That perfectly describes this film's leading lady. Surely, this is what Ed meant the title to reference. 

Ed Wood could very well have penned the box cover summary for this film as well. Though characteristically overheated in the most generic manner of porn, the word "luscious" jumped out at me as a word Ed used often for a full decade, going back to his magazine work at Pendulum.

A summary of the film. Note the spelling change in the title.

You can watch "Blond Mink" here. And keep watching this space for more dizzying updates as the Wood Loop Odyssey continues to spin out of control.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part 17 by Greg Javer

Don't be like Judge Clara here. Reserve those judgments.

(top) Swedish Erotica (bottom) Ed Wood, 1978.

Inevitably, every few months, I find myself revisiting the many creative outlets that Edward D. Wood, Jr. pursued throughout his life. First and foremost are his early feature films, allegedly the "worst" of their kind ever made (i.e. Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and the like). Then there are Eddie's later X-rated flicks, first softcore and later hardcore. His writing career for adult magazines—including short stories, articles, editorials, photo captions, and pictorial texts—followed the same basic trajectory as his film career, with his work becoming more graphic and less personal over time. Once hardcore pornography achieved mainstream popularity circa 1972, Ed spent his remaining years producing sexually explicit material for that market.

Since I inherited this series three years ago, I have been loathe to make any unfounded Ed-tributions of my own. And yet, increasingly, I find myself scratching my head and wondering, "Could Ed Wood have written this? It sounds like him. Just how ubiquitous was this guy? I know he was insanely prolific, but just how prolific?" 

By the latter half of the 1970s, hardcore magazines had largely dropped any pretense of respectability and were simply publishing gynecological photos in close-up. Such publications had obsolesced earlier, more traditional adult magazines, which still copied the appearance of more orthodox periodicals with their mix of stories, articles, photos, texts, and ads.

By 1978, the year Ed Wood died, the multimedia Swedish Erotica brand for which he often worked had established itself as one of the most recognizable forces in the adult industry. It wasn't a Swedish company, of course; its roots were strictly in Hollywood, stretching back to the late 1960s. Eddie started writing for a Los Angeles-based company called Pendulum Publishers when it launched in 1968. Pendulum operated under a variety of imprints throughout the early 1970s, including Calga, Gallery Press, and Edusex. Under the banner of Cinema Classics, the company diversified into films, making occasional features like 1972's The Young Marrieds, written and directed by Ed Wood, and hundreds upon hundreds of silent 8mm porn loops. Many of these loops had subtitles written by Ed, and the extent of his likely participation in multiple creative functions on these films is not yet fully known.

Circa 1972, the company launched the Swedish Erotica series of loops that would become the flagship of the enterprise. By 1978, entries in this seemingly endless series often served a dual purpose, with images from the loops and other on-set stills filling the pages of glossy color magazines. One such publication, a Swedish Erotica "film review magazine," caught my eye recently. While it's undated, certain details within it lead me to conjecture that it was published in 1979. Ed Wood had recently passed by then, of course, but we now know that Eddie was cashing checks signed by Art Publishers, Inc—the company name under which Swedish Erotica was doing business—as late as 1978.

Swedish Erotica Film Review Magazine, Vol. 11 includes a pro-pornography editorial that, against my better inclinations, I surmise was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. An "Ed-itorial," if you will. The tolerant tone of the article was, by the late 1970s, old hat. Overall, it reflects the "judge ye not" philosophy from Ed's 1953 film, Glen or Glenda, that foundational stone of Woodology for all us obsessives. The article's heavy use of ellipses is certainly characteristic of Ed Wood's writing.

Is this editorial an Ed-itorial? Read for yourself!

Compare the above to the disclaimer at the beginning of Glen or Glenda. Note the numerous, oddly placed pauses and the slightly stilted tone.

A disclaimer from Glen or Glenda.

Connie and her scarf.

The rest of the issue consists of images culled from numerous Swedish Erotica loops, accompanied by occasional text. The first article is a lengthy feature with images culled from Swedish Erotica loop #1115, "Hot, Black Soul." The action centers around an interracial threesome, consisting of two male "blacks," dubbed Captain and Taxes, and a white female identified as Connie. This is Connie Peterson, then a porn starlet. Notably, she's donning a pink neck-scarf, a staple of the Swedish Erotica brand.

The text reeks of Ed Wood in his latter years. It's thick with graphic sexual detail, while also evincing Eddie's self-imploding syntax and peculiar stream of consciousness, somehow stuttering and breathless at the same time. The text also includes some of the highly unique keywords that turn up often in Ed's adult texts, such as "jollies" and "stabbing."

Here are some choice excerpts from "Hot, Black Soul." The satisfied "Ummmmmmmmm" that emanates from Connie is a direct quote from the subtitles of the original loop. In that sixth and final clipping on the right, meanwhile, you'll find both "jollies" and "stabbing."

Excerpts from "Hot, Black Soul."

The magazine concludes with three brief photo features promoting three other Swedish Erotica loops. The accompanying capsule texts here are also suggestive of Ed's voice, but this is admittedly a stretch. If they are Eddie's work, however, they could be of great historical significance. Could these have been among the last published words by Edward D. Wood, Jr., perhaps printed shortly after his passing?

Did Ed Wood write this capsule summary?

What do you think?

For those who want to explore this subject further, the entire issue of Swedish Erotica Film Review Magazine, Vol. 11 is here.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part 16 by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood in 1969, when life was slow and oh so mellow.

Note to Readers: Normally, Greg sends me his articles by e-mail, which is my preferred method of correspondence. This week, however, he chose to send me a mysterious envelope filled with random scraps of paper, most of them badly stained and wrinkled. After considerable detective work and one particularly productive seance, I have managed to assemble these scraps into their proper order as Greg intended. Together, they form a comprehensive index of all the magazines produced by Pendulum Publishing in 1968 and 1969. Please enjoy. - J.B.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part Fourteen by Greg Dziawer

Hard Tack Harry stares down readers in this vintage Libra Press pictorial.

Daisy Chain Affairs

The cover of Gay Guys Book One.

In previous weeks, we've revisited Ed Wood's efforts in the gay-themed adult magazines released by Pendulum Publishing and its various corporate sisters, including the little-known Libra Press. Curiously, Libra's titles were not filed for copyright, as Pendulum titles commonly were. And now, we've found yet another intriguing Libra Press title: Gay Guys Book One. Likely a one-off "stroke book" rather than an ongoing series, it's undated. And though its contents are recycled from previous Pendulum mags, it is swollen with Wood.

This week, we're sharing two pictorial texts from this issue and wondering aloud if they could have penned by Ed.

Although the contents of this issue of Gay Guys stretch back to original material in Pendulum mags from as early as 1971, an ad late in the issue lists titles from Gallery Press mags from early 1974, dating the issue. Ed is credited within under his own name for the reprinted short story "I, Warlock," which originally appeared in the August/September 1971 issue of Gay Studs from Pendulum Publishers. The identical page layout is carried over from the original publication, as a matter of fact. The remainder of the issue's writing—including the editorial, a feature article, and more pictorial texts lifted from earlier pubs—is without credit, but on the whole suggests Ed's ubiquitous involvement.

The cover and two pictorials within feature Rick Cassidy, a porn star, bodybuilder, and model who appeared in a handful of softcore sex films written by Ed and directed by Stephen Apostolof in the the early '70s, including Drop Out Wife (1972). Cassidy's numerous hardcore films include the allegedly Wood-directed Bloomer Girl (1972).

The pictorial preceding "I, Warlock" in Gay Guys includes the following text accompaniment:

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Loop Orbit, Part Four by Greg Dziawer

"I'd like to buy an O."

A legendary porn producer.

Founded in 1974 by Noel C. Bloom, Caballero Control Corporation (later Caballero Home Video) was one of the most successful and durable adult film studios in American history. Noel was the son of another legend in the porn industry: publisher Bernie Bloom, whose Pendulum family of magazines employed Ed Wood frequently throughout the 1970s. Always desperate for quick cash during the last years of his life, Ed worked as a writer for Bernie on various adult magazine imprints, starting with Pendulum Press titles in 1969 and running through titles from Art Publishers, Inc (home to the multi-media Swedish Erotica empire) in late 1978, just before Ed's passing. Drawing on the Pendulum talent pool, Caballero likewise threw some work Eddie's way during those years for its film productions.

Another Pendlum staffer from that era, artist Phil Cambridge, was a coworker and personal friend of Ed Wood. He talked about the origins of Caballero and Ed's involvement therein with author Rudolph Grey for the book Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life And Art Of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

"When Caballero first started, they just did 8mm movies," Cambridge told Grey. "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."

We've quoted Cambridge before in this series, as a signpost to the discovery of 8mm loop subtitles that could have been written by Ed. In this week's Ed Wood Wednesdays, we're sharing another set of loop subtitles. These come from Danish Films International #10 Photo Layout from 1976. This short film stars a trio of Golden Age porn legends, though who is saying what is open to interpretation.

Read on and see if you detect the presence of Edward D. Wood, Jr. in these lines.

Photo Layout

Annette Haven (unnamed female, in a surprising white beaded necklace): DO WE HAVE A MODELLING JOB TODAY?

Linda Wong (as Susie, wearing the de rigueur chiffon neck scarf, here yellow): YES I HAVE TO CALL HIM.

Linda: SO IT IS ALL SET FOR TODAY.

Linda: WE'LL BOTH BE IN PINK AND WHITE GOWNS.

Linda: I'LL WRITE IT DOWN SO WE'LL BE SURE TO BE THERE.

Linda: BYE!

Linda: LET'S GO.

Annette: IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO TAKE PICTURES.

John Leslie (unnamed male): WHY DON'T YOU TWO GIRLS STAND OVER THERE.

John: WHY DON'T YOU MOVE IN A LITTLE CLOSER.

John: HOLD HANDS.

John: GREAT.

John: MOVE OVER THERE.

John: MOVE OVER HERE.

John: SUSIE ALONE.

Annette: YOU'RE PRETTY CUTE.

John: AW, COME ON.

John: LET'S GO IN THE HOUSE.

John: THAT SESSION WAS PRETTY GOOD.

Linda: WE ENJOYED IT, TOO.

Annette: LET'S SEE WHAT WE HAVE HERE.

Annette: UMMMMMMMM!!!!!!

Linda: LET ME GET MORE COMFORTABLE.

John: BOY, YOU SURE ARE STACKED FOR AN ORIENTAL CHICK.

Linda: LET ME.

Annette: BE MY GUEST.

Linda: OHHH!!!!

Linda: OH, YOU'RE MAKING ME SO WARM AND MOIST.

John: HELP ME MOVE THIS.

Annette: YOU MAKE MY NIPPLES SO HARD.

Annette: AHHH!!!!! IT'S SO BIG.

Annette: PUT IT IN, PUT IT IN!!!!!

John: OHHHH!!!!!!
  

Ending title card from the film.

Linda Wong in the customary yellow scarf

Whew! That's a veritable epic by the spare standards of these subtitled loops. And by "these," I mean the loop series that evince signatures of each other, traceable back to producer Noel Bloom. We've previously mentioned that Ed lists an astounding 716 so-called "short picture subjects" on his own resume, just from 1971 to 1973 alone. The possible playing field in which we could find evidence of Ed's hand is clearly immense, and still largely remains unknown. This week, we'll stick strictly to the subtitles.

With 33 lines and 154 words (4.7 words per line) this is the lengthiest set of Bloom-family loop subtitles I've yet transcribed, with a smattering of reasonably full sentences. And if Ed wrote it, the directions by John during the shoot take on a special meaning. Overall, the minimalism, simple syntax, font/placement and penchant for including the grunts and groans are all highly consistent across the subtitles through the years in a wide array of Bloom-family loops released under dozens and dozens of imprints. It's worth noting that, outside of this family of loops, other production companies and distributors rarely subtitled their 8mm porn loops. Why bother with the extra hassle and expense?

Box covers did not always include the information that a loop was subtitled, but when they did, it was touted as a selling point. It seems a questionable selling point to me, but given the silence of the loops, perhaps it appealed to a few (highly advanced) men out there craving a sense of sound. The Bloom-family loop series' of the first half of the '70s also distinguish themselves by possessing an arty quality compared to most of the other series out there, pointing not only to Bloom's (magnum opus) Swedish Erotica series but to the Golden Era's Porno Chic aesthetic, as well.

Annette Haven

Photo Layout was, like the loop Young and Proper aka Prudish Secretary (also starring Annette), a loop that Bloom derived plenty of mileage from. Both were released on the Danish Films International label, silent with subtitles and running almost 90 meters (roughly 16 minutes). Both were also released, cut to a shorter and more typical loop length, on the Danish Films loop label, in versions minus subtitles, with dubbing (yes, they dubbed films that were originally shot silent). Both turned up in features, on the same DVD compilation (Swedish Erotica Hard Vol 16) and both were given photo features in Danish Films magazines, with accompanying text likely written by Ed.

If you're familiar with the pornographic loops of this time period, the opening shot of the edited and dubbed version of this film will give you déjà vu: John walking out of and away from the camera, quickly revealing a girl on each side. The actual photo shoot is excised, necessitating a title change to Fashion Layout, and the dubbing never references it, nor does it in any way correspond to the the subtitled version. It also appeared as the finale of the feature Black Silk Stockings, a 1978 Swedish Erotica loop carrier.

Young and Proper aka Prudish Secretary likewise ended up in a feature, 1979's collection of Swedish Erotica loops, Sheer Panties. Both are credited to producer-director Billy Thornberg (real name Chris Warfield), who often put together loop carriers centered around Bloom-family loops. Beyond Fulfillment from 1975, featuring John Holmes throughout, includes loops with set decorations recognizable from a host of Bloom-family loops. Not to get too far astray from the topic at hand, but could Warfield's presence be a clue to the artistic personnel sometimes behind (when including multiple signatures) the Bloom-family loops on the whole? The loop carriers are introduced in the features with newly-shot footage including narrators. It's equally possible the credit refers to Warfield's involvement there. We'll come back to this in a future Ed Wood Wednesday.

Porn legend John Leslie

If all of those permutations have you confused, now factor in two Danish Films International loops with the index number #10. Flesh Eater is from 1973. Photo Layout was released in 1976, on a second run of titles under the Danish Films International imprint that featured longer loops and replicated the index numbers of the first 30+ loops in the series. We surmise this is #10 as the last subtitle before The End card, same font and placement as the subtitles reads: DANISH #10. And that End card, of course, is in the same script-like font that closes out the Swedish Erotica loops.

What you are really wondering, no doubt, is if Ed really did pen these subtitles. Let's cut to the chase. I've included this as a Wood Loop Orbit, areas of Woodology suggestive of Ed's involvement at best and stages upon which we knew he stood (literally and figuratively) at very least. I surmise a high likelihood that Ed wrote many if not most of these Bloom-family loop subtitles, which ran into the hundreds if not thousands, including this one.

If he didn't, who did?

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Orbit, Part Three by Greg Dziawer

This week, we're looking into Ed Wood's career as an editorial writer,.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Orbit, Part Two by Greg Dziawer

A reader prepares to enjoy Tod's First Time from 1972.

Thevis Like Us

When I think of Ed Wood's work for Pendulum Publishing in the 1960s and '70s, I generally think first of the company's many adult-oriented magazines. Eddie penned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of short stories and articles for Pendulum, not to mention endless editorials, pictorial texts, and photo captions. Then I ponder, perhaps too fondly, Pendulum's numerous illustrated "socio-sex" paperbacks, the ones rooted in the work of the fabled sex expert T. K. Peters. While Ed wrote nearly a quarter of these psuedo-educational texts, I suspect he wrote just about all of the photo captions (80 or so per book) across the roughly 50 paperbacks in the two Peters' series.

And there were Pendulum's X-rated films, including not only features like Ed Wood's Necromania but also hundreds if not thousands of 8mm home market loops. Ed wrote subtitles for these short silent films sold through mail order. He wrote the box cover and catalog summaries for them, too, and contributed in as-yet-undiscovered ways to their making. 

A kingpin of the porn biz.

Pendulum's magazines, though, are the constant throughline in the last decade or so of Ed Wood's life. Ed unequivocally wrote across hundreds and hundreds of issues, sometimes using his own name, other times working pseudonymously or anonymously. Eventually, Pendulum Publishing morphed into Calga, then Gallery Press. The company also spawned offshoot imprints like Edusex and Libra Press, in addition to churning out generic "triple-dot" magazines (identifiable because of the tall-tale ellipsis on the cover). The Pendulum empire finally reached its zenith with the multimedia Swedish Erotica franchise, comprised of both pornographic loops and magazines.

The Pendulum story is a long and involving one that we have been chipping away at, one week at a time, in these articles. But we have thus far neglected the genesis of the company. No more. It's a story that starts with a colorful yet infamous businessman named Michael George Thevis, born in 1932 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A key figure at the dawn of the Golden Age of Porn in the 1960s, Thevis rapidly grew his company, Peachtree Books of Atlanta, into a major distributor of adult magazines and paperbacks. By the end of the decade, he had diversified his enterprise into a multimedia porn conglomerate. Pendulum Publishing, also originally based in Atlanta, grew out of Thevis' Peachtree operation.

Seeking to expand his geographical reach and increase in-house production, Thevis bankrolled a Southern California branch for Pendulum. Placed in charge of that operation was Bernie Bloom, who at that time had been a managing editor for a preeminent West Coast mag distributor and sometimes-publisher called Golden State News Ed was already working for Bernie at GSN, writing both paperbacks (many still not identified) and texts for magazines. Incorporating Pendulum's Los Angeles operation in the spring of 1968, Bernie hired Ed first. Their first products for Pendulum were Ed Wood's illustrated paperbacks Raped in the Grass (1968) and Bye Bye Broadie (1968).

Thevis' Atlanta operation also produced illustrated socio-sex paperbacks that served as templates for the ones Bernie Bloom would later produce in Los Angeles. (It was Bernie's innovation to use T.K. Peters' work as source material.) Meanwhile, the Atlanta publisher also released numerous gay-themed magazines, including the one I'll be discussing this week.

Judging by the handful of magazines I have been able to locate, Pendulum's Atlanta branch had no writing staff to speak of in 1972. These issues typically consist of photos only -- no captions, no editorials, no stories. But Tod's First Time, a one-time only "stroke book" from that same year, is an anomaly in that it includes a freewheeling (read: inebriate) text. Who could have written it? Keep in mind that some of Pendulum's early Los Angeles output still carries the Atlanta address. 

In any event, the text from Tod's First Time is presented below, spelling and other typographical errors intact, for the first time in 45 years. Read it for yourself.