Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 284: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 3]

A lifetime's worth of memories in just 32 crudely-Xeroxed pages.

A magazine from 1993.

Information is like tap water these days. Any time of the day or night, whenever we want it, it's there for our use. Just turn on the faucet and enjoy. True, there are places in this world where information is decidedly not accessible to all. By the same token, there are places where tap water isn't available either. There are probably places where neither is available. Be glad you don't live in any of those places.

Here, in the land of the free, we have become accustomed to information on demand as well as media on demand. If an album, movie, or TV show isn't available instantly, we declare it "lost." That's how impatient we've become. If you have to go to a library to get it, it doesn't exist. But we should remember that it wasn't always so. There was a time not so long ago when we were much more reliant on printed material and physical media for the information we now take for granted.

Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, a 1981 chapbook by superfans Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin, is a product of that time before the information revolution. In those days, if you wanted details about an offbeat director like Eddie, you had to comb through the archives and maybe contact people who knew him personally. And so they did. Only a handful of Ed Wood's movies were accessible at that time, and much of Ed's career was entirely undocumented. But Randy and Harold cobbled together whatever they could and assembled a 32-page booklet from their findings, which they then distributed via mail order from an office in Hollywood. They called this operation The Edward D. Wood, Jr. Film Appreciation Society or EDWJFAS.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 283: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (center, cowering) in the nightmare sequence from Glen or Glenda.

This time last week, we were talking about Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films, a surprisingly thorough 1981 chapbook about Eddie's strange life and career created by two very dedicated California fans, Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin. These young men conducted their research at a time when there were no books about Ed Wood on the market and Eddie's movies weren't even readily available on home video. The acknowledgements page suggests that Randy and Harold may have contacted some of Eddie's family, friends, and professional associates in assembling their booklet.

We'd only gotten as far as the book's capsule biography of Ed Wood, namely because I'd gotten bogged down in discussing how much of it was true and how much of it wasn't. But now, we get into the heart of A Man and His Films: a discussion of Eddie's filmography. The authors have divided this material into several sections: The Major Films (four movies), The Lesser Known Films (five movies), and The Lost Films (two movies, one unreleased and one unproduced). This gives you an idea of how well-documented Eddie's career was in 1981 and how much was still unknown to the public.

So what are Eddie's "major films"? The authors list just four: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), Glen or Glenda (1953), and Jail Bait (1954). (And, yeah, they're in that order for some reason.) Remember, at this time, Night of the Ghouls (1959) aka Revenge of the Dead had not been rediscovered and released on home video. So if you wanted some classic 1950s Ed, you really only had those first four features to go by.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 282: 'Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films' (1981) [PART 1]

A remarkable fan creation from the early 1980s.

We may think we want to travel back in time, but we probably wouldn't like the past very much once we got there. For one thing, we're so reliant on modern-day technology that it would be incredibly frustrating to be without it for any extended length of time. I can remember how cumbersome research used to be when I was in school. To write just one term paper on the Old English poet Cynewulf, for example, I had to check out a whole stack of books from the college library. Today, all that precious Cynewulf knowledge would be at my fingertips whenever I wanted it.

This entire series of articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) would not be remotely possible without the internet and the ability to access decades of video, audio, and text instantly. I marvel at the work of writers who did their research during the low-tech, pre-internet days. How did they do it? More than a decade before Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), a couple of dedicated Wood fans in California named Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin assembled and self-published a chapbook about their favorite director called Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Man and His Films (1981). Though crude by today's standards—the pictures are xeroxed, the text is typewritten—it remains a priceless souvenir of early '80s fan culture and a remarkable example of Wood scholarship.

This 32-page guidebook to Ed Wood's film career declares itself "a publication of The Edward D. Wood Jr. Film Appreciation Society." So what the hell is that? Did the EDWJFAS do anything else besides this? Well, maybe. In an article from the September 8, 1981 issue of The Soho News, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum mentions the EDWJFAS in his dual review of Ferdinando Baldi's 3D Western Comin' at Ya! (1981) and Gus Trikonis' rowdy comedy Take This Job and Shove It (1981). He says that the organization has formed "recently" and "produced a marathon screening and monograph." The writer suggests that audiences are sick of middlebrow mainstream fare such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and are taking solace in pure trash. Rosenbaum is in favor of this.