The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 16: The cutting room floor

There's no lonelier place in cinema.

When filmmakers use the term "shooting ratio," they don't mean the aspect ratio of the movie they're making. Instead, they're talking about the amount of footage they shot versus the amount that actually wound up in the finished movie. For example, director George Miller shot 480 hours of footage for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which ended up running two hours when it finally hit theaters. That's a 240:1 shooting ratio, which is extreme even for a high-budget picture. To put that in perspective, the ratio for Francis Ford Coppola's notoriously troubled Apocalypse Now (1979) was 95:1. High but not Fury Road high.

What do you think Ed Wood's shooting ratios were? Well, we actually have some evidence to work with here. Ed's Take It Out in Trade (1970) runs about 80 minutes. Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes (1995) runs about 69 minutes. Assuming every scrap of unused footage wound up in the outtake reel, that's 149 total minutes of film and a shooting ratio of 1.8:1. But let's be generous and round that up to 2:1. For projects like the Swedish Erotica loops, Ed's ratio was probably more like 1:1, meaning everything that was shot made the final cut.

Come to think of it, there's one more still-existent Ed Wood outtake reel that I know of: the one for his 1951 made-for-TV short, The Sun was Setting. The reel runs about seven minutes and change. The finished film itself is 13 and a half minutes. Altogether, that's 21 minutes of footage and a very economical 1.5:1 shooting ratio. Notice that, just like with the TIOIT outtakes, these are either alternate takes or little scraps from the beginnings and ends of scenes. There are no missing or deleted sequences visible here.

There's a reason we don't have a treasure trove of extra scenes from Ed Wood's movies: Eddie couldn't afford to film anything that wasn't going to be used in the final cut. Hell, he had to pad his movies with stock footage just to get them to feature length. Every scrap of celluloid was precious to him. If you wonder why Ed left so many bloopers in his movies—boom mics dipping into frame, actors flubbing lines, etc.—there's your answer. In a way, it lends an air of realism to his films, as acknowledged in this classic scene from Ed Wood (1994).

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Promo Odyssey, Part 7 by Greg Dziawer

This week's article takes us to jolly old England.

Ed Wood's sex film work of the 1960s and '70s was often featured in the adult magazines of that period. Publications like Unreleased Dynamic Films, Torrid Films, and Fiery Films—among dozens of others—filled their pages with stills from low-budget sex films, accompanied by texts that ranged from reviews to plot summaries to outright ballyhoo. It was a win-win for all involved: inexpensive content for the publishers and promotion for the filmmakers.

Though common in America, such magazines were published around the world. A colleague recently shared with me an issue of Cinema X, published in London. Cinema X, vol. 4, no. 4, from 1971 includes a photo feature about Ed's Take It Out In Trade, meaning that this film must have played across the pond!

Unlike its US counterparts, which typically focused exclusively on low-budget sex films, this issue of Cinema X sandwiches Ed in with articles on the expected sex films but also includes pieces about Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, and an interview with Mario Van Peebles. I'm happy to share it with you!

Here's a link to a PDF of the Cinema X article. (WARNING: NSFW)

Special thanks to Spicy Goldman, Esq. for supplying it to me. If you are a fan of vintage sex films, be sure to check out his fantastic site, Capri Show World Center (caprishowworld.com).

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Set Decoration Odyssey, Part 10 by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg takes a look at a rare Rene Bond loop from 1971.

Never a dull moment in 1971?

On October 12,1892, American schoolchildren began reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for the first time. Seventy-nine years later to the day, Rod Stewart's "Maggie May" topped singles charts around the world, its lyrics ironically referring to a young man missing school to be with an older lover. Funny how values change over time.

But October 12, 1971 was a day like any other at a building that stood at 7428 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood. At the time, a small studio was situated there, run by talent agent and cinematographer Hal Guthu. For Ed Wood obsessives, Hal's name doubtless rings a bell. He served as the cinematographer on two pornographic features directed by Ed, Take It Out In Trade (1970) and Necromania (1971). Interiors for both of those films were shot at Guthu's studio, as well as hundreds of silent 8mm loops destined to be exhibited in peepshow arcades or in the privacy of customers' homes.

I've spent a lot of time identifying the set decorations that were common to those features. These same decorations also turn up in another of Wood's late-career porno flicks, The Young Marrieds (1972), and they're ubiquitous in numerous other West Coast loops of the era, many of which likely featured some involvement by Ed Wood.

That day in October 1971, prolific adult film actress Rene Bond, the female protagonist in Necromania, arrived at Hal's studio to shoot a loop punningly titled "Lady 'Dike'tor." Guthu was Rene's agent and friend, so the actress worked at Hal's studio often. He rented out his sets to a variety of film companies. It was a smart setup by Hal, with multiple revenue streams. He provided both the girls and the sets, and he could even get behind the camera if needed. His clients shooting there that day were a pair of unknown and forgotten filmmakers, director Herb Redd and cameraman Marv Ellis.

In fact, Redd and Ellis' names might have been lost to time entirely if two of the loops they shot at Hal's studio that day hadn't survived, containing the original clapperboards at the head of the reels. I recently spotted "Lady 'Dike'tor," featuring a pre-breast-enhancement Rene Bond (another clue this is 1971), as the first loop on the Blue Vanities compilation All Lesbian Peepshows #562, released in 1994. A vast trove of vintage loops from the era, the Blue Vanities compilation series started in the '80s and ran to well over 600 volumes, eventually totaling upwards of ten thousand loops. It's a lot to sift through, admittedly, but over and over I always find some little gem connected to Ed Wood.

I was happy to note, for instance, that "Lady 'Dike'tor" was shot on the very same set as the climax of The Young Marrieds. The same blue wall is adorned by recognizable set decs like the lion's head door knocker that greets visitors to Madame Heles' abode in Necromania. And perhaps most awesome of all, as I have rarely seen it elsewhere, the white brick fireplace prop is visible at the right edge of frame.

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

The life of Ray "Crash" Corrigan was not without scandal.

I. Serial Killers 

Ray Corrigan with his son Tommy.

Until I finally saw Ed Wood's 1970 feature Take It Out in Trade for the first time last week, I had never thought about that film too deeply. I'd already seen the outtakes many times over. They were originally released by Something Weird Video back in the '90s on VHS, and they're now included on the new DVD/Blu-ray edition of Take It Out in Trade. Poring over those silent outtakes, I'd recognized many pieces of set decoration from other Wood-related productions of the era, including a gold skull and a bronze king cobra. Wood biographer Rudolph Grey noted both of those items in his capsule review of the film in his book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. back in 1992. Grey also mentions the film's associate producer, Ray Corrigan. 

As it turns out, this is the same actor and stuntman Ray "Crash" Corrigan who starred as one of the Three Mesquiteers in dozens of B-Westerns in the mid-to-late 1930s, alongside actors like John Wayne, Robert Livingston, and Max Terhune. Ray also appeared in his share of Republic serials. In fact, he'd taken his screen name Corrigan from the character he played in one such production, 1936's The Undersea Kingdom, two chapters of which later wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Corrigan also owned his own gorilla costumes and, for a time, was the go-to guy in low-budget films to play any gorilla characters a script might require. In addition, he ran the Corriganville Ranch—filming location for thousands of motion pictures and TV shows, mostly Westerns—for more than a quarter of a century. He sold the place in the mid-'70s to Bob Hope, who redubbed it Hopetown. By that time, the film industry in which Ray once flourished had been slowly killed off—first by television, then by movies that showed things you couldn't see on TV.

II. A Coincidence?

While I was digging around last week about Ray "Crash" Corrigan, a search result returned an obituary for a Don "Crash" Corrigan. The associated details seemed unrelated to Ray—I had not come across any mention that Ray had a son named Don—but I nonetheless obviously had to click on it to learn the truth.

The obituary for Don "Crash" Corrigan ultimately proved to have no relevance to my pursuit. Strangely, though—and I can say unreservedly that the most amazing aspect of researching Ed Wood has been for me these moments of seeming "agency"—Don Corrigan turned out to have grown up in the neighborhood where I now live, and he graduated in 1966 from the school my 15-year-old daughter now attends, four blocks down the street. Two instances of his obit were published in the local papers here in Wilkes-Barre, PA. 

III. Use Cases, or: What's It All About, Alfie?

"Crash" Corrigan's first starring role came in the 1936 Republic serial The Undersea Kingdom, influenced by Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon. An ad from the December 25, 1936 Kansas City Star pairs the serial with an Our Gang short. 

Undersea Kingdom is paired with Our Gang.

A comic short series popular since the silent era, the Our Gang films were sold to television in 1955 under the better-known title The Little Rascals and enjoyed decades of success on the new medium. Our Gang's most famous alumnus must be the character of Alfalfa, the skinny, squeaky-voiced boy played by Carl Switzer. Tragically, just as his old films were finding a new audience, Swtizer died an untimely death in a violent dispute with a man named Moses "Bud" Stiltz in North Hollywood in 1959. Stiltz had been Ray's ranch foreman as Corriganville began to fade in popularity as a movie set.

Here's a write-up about the case from the January 22, 1959 edition of The Madera Tribune.

The sad end of Alfalfa.

IV. Spanky and Alfalfa

In 1958, The Bride and the Beast, a jungle melodrama written by Ed Wood, was released. The titular beast, an amorous gorilla who steals Charlotte Austin away from Lance Fuller, is widely reported to have been played by Ray "Crash" Corrigan, who'd portrayed many such beasts over the years. A 2007 DVD edition of the film maintains it was actually Ray's protege, Steve Calvert, inside the suit, but Drew Friedman's Ed Wood, Jr. Players trading card set (1995) credits Ray with the part, as does Nightmare of Ecstasy. Friedman suggests Ray and Steve were the same person.

Ray Corrigan's card in the Drew Friedman series.

Ray's second wife, Elaine DuPont, noted that her husband went often to the San Diego Zoo to watch the gorillas and study their movements.. Elaine performed for the public at the Corriganville Ranch, as a singer and Western trick rider. Like Ray, she sported embroidered Western wear designed by the legendary Nudie Cohn. Elaine also said that Ray had four gorilla costumes. 

The gorilla in Bride of the Beast, curiously, is named Spanky. Another Our Gang connection!

V. Disintegration

Corrigan's first marriage to Rita Jane Smeal, whom he met when she was an usherette in 1938, disintegrated in 1954. The couple had three children, the oldest of them named Tommy. And, according to the commentary track by Rudolph Grey and Frank Henenlotter on Take It Out in Trade, it was Tommy who supplied the gorgeous print of the film for the new special edition.

The Corrigans' divorce proceedings soon grew ugly, with Rita charging that Ray had threatened her life and the lives of their children with a loaded gun. Ray made a counter-charge of his own, accusing Rita of adultery with the aforementioned Bud Stiltz.

Here are some articles about Ray and Rita's divorce from the May 4 and June 4, 1954 editions of The San Bernadino Sun.

The Corrigans' marriage did not end well.

Rita would subsequently marry Stiltz. Five years into their union, Carl Switzer knocked on the door of Rita and Bud's place, reputedly demanding money owed him by Bud. Bud shot and killed him, under circumstances that remain mysterious. Although the incident was ultimately ruled to be self-defense, Tommy Corrigan has said, "It was more like murder." Moses "Bud" Stiltz died at the age of 62 on May 15, 1983 in San Bernadino, California. He's buried in Forest Lawn.

VI. A New Look

A newspaper interview with Ray Corrigan in late 1970 found him scouting film locations in Oregon. The article mentions Ray producing and appearing in a film titled The Ribald Robin Hood. He's surely referring to The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood (1969). That film's IMDb page lists a clutch of producers, but Ray is not among them. In the credits, though, we find mention of a certain Raymond Renard. His own IMDb page includes French films we'll conclude were the work of a different Ray Renard. 

From The Oregonian, December 21, 1970.

A showing of Ed Wood's Trade.

At this point, I should explain that Ray "Crash" Corrigan's real name was Raymond Benitz. Before he took his famous screen name, he was billed as Ray Benard and, erroneously, Ray Bernard. So the Ray Renard from Robin Hood could just be Ray Corrigan under yet another pseudonym.

UPDATE: Bryin Abraham of the blog A Wasted Life  reported by e-mail from Berlin that he had screened The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood in the process of compiling an article about Uschi Digard. The article mentions that Ray "Crash" Corrigan had indeed appeared in the film as Robin's dad. Ray's appearance in Robin Hood is confirmed by author Jerry L. Schneider in the 2016 book The True Story of Ray "Crash" Corrigan.

In the 1970 newspaper interview, Ray downplays the sexual content of Take It Out In Trade, with the article referring to it as a "new look" film.  This was a euphemism for the then-burgeoning softcore genre, which was about to be subsumed by hardcore sex films like Deep Throat (1972). The movie Ray was then said to be producing, Sex in America, appears to have never been completed, at least not under that title. 

And as the newspaper article notes, Ray had business interests in the northwestern United States, including the San Juan Islands, which remain a popular location from which to spot Orca whales. On the Take It Out in Trade commentary track, Frank Henenlotter repeatedly insists that the film never played theatrically. However, as vintage newspaper ads attest, the film did play the Pacific Northwest, including a stint at the Eros Theater in Portland, Oregon.

"Crash" passed away a few hundred miles south in Brookings, Oregon in August 1976. He was 74.

Ed Wood Extra: Wanna read most of an Ed Wood story from 1972?

This little beauty ran in the first issue of Trois in September 1972. Volume one, number one. Published by Gallery Press. The title is "Take It Out in Trade," but it has nothing to do with the movie of the same name. Enjoy. Sorry the ending is missing.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: 'Take It Out in Trade' - A hot take by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood is a triple threat in Take It Out in Trade.

A new Ed-ition of an old film.

A copy of the new DVD/Blu-ray edition of Ed Wood's long-lost Take It Out in Trade (1970) was delivered under the tree by Santa, and I just popped it in a bit ago. The Crash Corrigan angle—the veteran stuntman is listed as an associate producer in the opening credits—is awesome, of course. Funny how the whole plot, sans dialog, is there in the outtakes. The film looks to have been shot at a ratio of about 1.6:1 or so. Really lean. But it's polished, far more so than The Only House in Town (1971). 

Wood biographer Rudolph Grey says in the liner notes that Trade was shot in a house in Lake Sherwood, CA. It was also, often, shot on sets at talent agent Hal Guthu's studio on Santa Monica. You can tell by some of the familiar props from that site. The bronze king cobra ashtray is there, for instance, as is the infamous gold skull! The clapperboards in the outtakes should tell the story of where they were shooting and when for those three fateful days.

The liner notes seem to credit Corrigan as the movie's principal producer, but he is officially credited as an associate producer only. Someone named "Edward Ashdown" is one of the two credited producers; it's an interesting name with no ties I can find. The other, "Richard Gonzalez," is also kind of nebulous. Maybe it's an in-joke reference to the tennis player? 

My surmise is that Take It Out in Trade had to have been financed by an actual film company, even if only a fringe entity. The disc's liner notes give the distributor as Mar-Jon, so I'll have to look into that. I feel like it would have to have some connection to Pendulum Publishing honcho Bernie Bloom or, more likely, Bernie's son Noel. At the time of this movie, Eddie was writing ubiquitously for Bernie's Pendulum (and related) magazines, plus the pseudo-educational "sociosex" paperbacks. And the Bloom family's pornogaphic loops (on which Eddie also toiled) were in a nascent state. 

All of these details aside, inferred or a stretch, it's quite incredible to think that Crash Corrigan produced a softcore sex film written by, directed by, and starring Ed Wood! Yes, Eddie was a "triple threat" on Take It Out in Trade. When you think about it, the only other film in the Wood canon that we know of that fits that bill is Glen or Glenda!

To a New Year!

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

A relic from the heyday of 1970s porn.

Prop of the week: a bronze statue.

When we examine the films Ed Wood worked on in some capacity during his final decade—plus the ones we think he might have worked on—we see how often they intersect through their set decorations. There are distinctive props, furnishings, and wall hangings that turn up again and again in these 1970s adult movies.

I've already covered several of these decorations previously. For instance, there are the Chinese guardian lions and the lion's head door knocker that show up in Necromania and The Young Marrieds, two feature films directed by Ed, as well as in numerous silent 8mm loops. Then there's the black velvet painting of a panther descending a stone staircase. And let's not forget the infamous gold and white skull. 

Some of these set decorations serve as signposts to the alert viewer that a particular movie was made at Hal Guthu's studio set on Santa Monica Blvd. That's not always a guarantee, though, that Ed Wood was involved. I've seen some films and loops that feature items from those sets but likely have nothing to do with Ed. However, the lion's share (no pun intended) of these set decorations strongly suggest that Ed Wood was involved in a production.

This week, I'm going to follow an item I first noticed in Necromania. I traced this item first to another one of Ed Wood's features and finally to a mysterious but intriguing loop.

Ed's feature film Necromania is rife with items that turn up in other movies. It was only recently, while watching the outtakes of Take It Out In Trade, that an item from Necromania I had not spotted previously caught my eye. In Necromania, when Danny (Ric Lutze) and Shirley (Rene Bond) enter Madame Heles' place at the outset of the story, there stands a small piece of bronze decorative statuary just inside the door, sitting on the floor in the lower right corner of the screen. It's a squat, bulbous thing maybe about a foot and a half high. In the Trade outtakes, during a shot of a travel poster, two such bronze statues appear in the bottom left and right corners of the screen, indicating they were a pair.

Bronze statues in (from left): Cafe Lust, Necromania, and Take It Out In Trade.

Mere days later, I was screening some 1970s adult loops, and—sure enough—there it was again. The loop in question, Café Lust, takes place on a cheap strip joint stage set. The cast consists of two gals and a guy. One of the aforementioned bronze statues sits atop a table in the corner of the set, just to the left of the stage. The stage itself uses a piece of zebra-striped fabric as a backdrop. I've seen this same fabric repurposed again and again in these movies: as a blanket, as a wall hanging, as decorative bric-a-brac, and even as a carpet! Café Lust gave me my best view yet of this faux zebra skin. Up close, it looks like it is indeed a carpet.

Café Lust is also fascinating in that it dates from the brief era when the porn industry was transitioning from softcore to hardcore, placing it circa 1970. (Meanwhile, the clapperboards visible in the outtakes from Take It Out In Trade indicate it was filmed in mid-January 1970.) Lust survives today, ID'ed as "White Box Productions #23." This is another example of a loop that was packaged anonymously in an effort to protect its makers. The filmmakers obviously took some other precautions. There are a few halfhearted attempts to block out genitalia with objects in the foreground, and an oral sex scene is clearly entirely faked, with the act itself obscured throughout by the actresses' hair.

Aesthetically, the sparse strip show stage in Café Lust makes the stage in The Young Marrieds look ornate by comparison. But that could be owing strictly to the lighting and we could be on the very same set. Also worth noting: the stripper's dance moves are extraordinarily similar to those of the stripper in The Young Marrieds.

The real question, as always, is: Was Ed Wood involved in this loop? The circumstantial evidence suggests that he was, but that's still just an inference. We're close, without a doubt, but there remains more work to do. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 49: 'Take It Out in Trade' (1970)

Ed Wood also published an unrelated  short story in Trois magazine (1972) with the same title as this movie.

"An extraordinary performance."

I have been wanting to see Ed Wood's Take It Out in Trade (1970) for -- dear Lord -- twenty years now. Last week, thanks to the good people at Manhattan's Anthology Film Archives, I finally did. Like many of my fellow Woodologists, my interest in Take It Out began with Rudolph Grey's unorthodox biography of Ed, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992).

In the introduction to that book, Grey talks about what he learned while researching Ed's life. "Particularly exciting," he says "was finally locating a print of one of Ed Wood's last feature films, Take It Out in Trade (1970), a surreal sex comedy that proved to be a major discovery."

Later in the book, Ed's widow, Kathy, talks a bit about the film's origin and production, as do several cast members. One interviewee is Nona Carver, an ex-burlesque dancer and former girlfriend of Kenne Duncan. Another is actor Michael Donovan O'Donnell, who actually appeared in some mainstream flicks like Paint Your Wagon (1969) and Dick Tracy (1990)  as well as many prominent B-movies, including Russ Meyer's Vixen (1968) and Greydon Clark's Satan's Cheerleaders (1977) and Black Shampoo (1976) over the course of a 22-year Hollywood career. 

Towards the end of the book, in the annotated filmography, Rudolph Grey gives a fairly thorough, blow-by-blow description of Take It Out in Trade. Among his observations there:

This movie marked Wood's return to directing after a hiatus of ten years. Visual puns and slapstick are intermingled with conventional softcore sex scenes. There are odd touches of para-psychedlicism and surrealism. The most remarkable sequence is a seven-minute segment featuring Ed Wood (billed under the name "Alecia") decked out in a lime-green dress, fluffy orange sweater, white plastic boots, and a blonde wig in an extraordinary performance.

SWV's version.

Now, tell me, what kind of Ed Wood fan could resist such a movie? I simply had to see it. The problem was, I couldn't. Even after Nightmare of Ecstasy was published in 1992 and became the basis for Tim Burton's Ed Wood in 1994, Take It Out in Trade did not appear on VHS or DVD for public consumption. After the big buildup it received in Nightmare of Ecstasy, Take It Out basically disappeared for two decades.

Those of you who have been following Ed Wood Wednesdays for a while may remember that I once reviewed a Something Weird Video compilation tape from 1995 called Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes, which consists of about an hour's worth of silent bloopers and unused shots from Wood's long-lost movie. In that article, I also provided a thumbnail sketch of Take It Out's convoluted history and supplied a rundown of its principal cast members. TIOIT: The Outtakes gives you an idea of the basic outline of the plot: wealthy Frank Riley (Duke Moore) and his snooty wife are unaware that their daughter, Shirley Riley (Donna Stanley),  has become a high-priced prostitute and is living and working in a brothel, so they hire a sex-crazed private detective named Mac McGregor (O'Donnell) to track her down.

The outtakes also give you a pretty good idea of what the sets, costumes, hairstyles, and actors look like. But even though it's interesting as a historical curio, the Something Weird tape does not even remotely convey the experience of watching the real Take it Out in Trade. This, then, I will try to convey to you. Keep in mind that I have only watched this movie one time and am writing solely from memory:

• The version that Anthology Film Archives screened looked to have been transferred from videotape. The monaural sound was not exactly Dolby quality, but both the music and dialogue were quite listenable and distinct. The picture was a bit blurry, as if this were a second- or third-generation copy. (The AFA only says that its source was "digital.") Probably due to lack of proper preservation, the whole movie had kind of a yellowish-orange hue to it, like a slice of processed American cheese. But it's definitely watchable and in relatively good shape. The credited cinematographer here is Hal Guthu, who also worked on Love Feast (1969). Guthu is no Bill Thompson, but he does yeoman's work behind the camera in this feature.

• The opening credits sequence features a nude woman drawing on herself with red lipstick. She first colors in both nipples, then draws a floral-looking border around her pubic hair, and finally puts some dots and scribbles on her ass.  This strange footage is later recycled (verbatim, I believe) during an inexplicable montage midway through the film.

• As an actor, Ed Wood is only listed as "Alecia," but he gets a proud "Written and Directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr." credit at the end of the main titles. And this isn't an opportunistic, latter-day addition either, like Rhino's DVD of Love Feast. Eddie's credit in Take It Out appears to be organic to the original 1970 print. For those ultra-purists who only count the feature-length films Eddie wrote and directed under his own name, this is as much an "official Ed Wood movie" as Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) or Glen or Glenda (1953). Those folks can now stop saying Eddie only directed six movies. It's at least seven. (The real total is much higher.)

• Wood fans will likely be thrilled to note that he has reverted to his old habit of punctuating his film with bursts of thunder and lightning, just as he did in Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster (1955), The Bride and the Beast (1958), Night of the Ghouls (1959), and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Here, though, the lightning is just represented by flashes of bright light. We also see a young lady opening an umbrella indoors for the "rain" that never falls. The effect, as always, is of God Himself angrily commenting upon the proceedings.

Michael Donovan O'Donnell

• The entire film is narrated by its protagonist, middle-aged, mustachioed detective Mac McGregor. Actor Michael Donovan O'Donnell compared his character to Raymond Chandler's sardonic Philip Marlowe, but McGregor is more like Marlowe on giggle gas. At times, O'Donnell's voice is very similar to that of Ed Wood, so much so that I thought Ed might have been narrating the movie himself. But, no, it's O'Donnell. With his fuzzy sideburns, receding hairline, buck teeth, and slightly flabby physique, Mac is quite the unlikely hero of an erotic movie. Perhaps this character was meant to be relatable to the frustrated middle-aged men in the audience. Today, such a character would be a lean, toned, brooding Adonis about half O'Donnell's age.

• At the very beginning, Mac tells us that Los Angeles is his "kind of town" and informs us that his main interest in life is sex, of which he gets a lot. He also boasts about his detecting skills, referring to himself as "The Chaser." That self-appointed nickname is a pun that hints at another major motif in this movie: booze. Seemingly everyone Mac encounters offers him alcohol, usually whiskey, and he always accepts. In one scene, Ed Wood's character all but forces Mac to drink, and the poor detective nearly chokes to death from the foul rotgut liquor Ed serves him.

• Mac is kind of a shady, low-rent character. He says he has "two offices." One is in the bathroom of the Brown Derby, and the other appears to be in a Salvation Army thrift store. There are several exterior shots of the Derby, by the way, and it's nice to see that iconic Hollywood locale pop up in one of Ed's later movies. The revelation that Mac works out of the john is one of the movie's better-constructed gags. Mac has a handmade placard taped up over the word "MEN'S" on the wall, and we watch him take it down at one point and thus give away his true location. Take It Out is a relative rarity in the Wood canon in that it is a deliberate comedy with intentional jokes. Off the top of my head, the only other examples I can think of are the Wood-scripted One Million AC/DC (1969) and possibly the two Bunnies films Ed did with Steve Apostolof in 1972 and 1976.

• The movie was mostly filmed with synchronized sound, and boom-mic shadows are fairly common throughout. But there are other scenes that were clearly shot silently, with narration, dialogue, and sound effects added later. Eddie seemed to go a little nuts here, using patently silly, almost cartoonish voices and sounds for some scenes. I particularly remember one prostitute who says something like, "Baloney! You probably say that to all the girls!" in a ridiculously nasal voice. This technique is highly reminiscent of Glen or Glenda, which also leaned heavily on post-dubbing and got some laughs from the odd accents and speech cadences of the voice actors. Musically, Take It Out seems to have been scored with stock music, mostly jazzy in nature. There is one musical motif in particular that I was humming for at least 20 minutes after the movie ended.

Nona Carver's big scene in Take It Out in Trade.

• Actress Nona Carver remembers there being two versions of the movie: one softcore, the other hard. But the edition of the film I saw was strictly softcore. It had plenty of female nudity but only a smattering of very non-explicit simulated lovemaking in which the partners simply crawl on top of one another and start bouncing around, occasionally even keeping their underpants on. The fondling of buttocks is a major motif in this movie. 

• Exposed penises are rare to nonexistent here. Occasionally, there are sex-related gags, as when we see a procession of three women coming down a fuzzy red staircase: the first topless, the second bottomless, and the third nude. Ed Wood was clearly sensitive of the needs of the horny men in the audience, but he still wanted to tell a complete story. Therefore, during the scenes in which characters have to discuss the plot, there are brief, totally non-sequitir cutaways to attractive nude ladies romping for the cameras. These moments are often accompanied by "wacky" xylophone glissandos on the soundtrack. You're never more than about a minute away from nudity at any given point in this film.

• As you'd expect in an Ed Wood movie, the editing (by Wood himself) adds to the surrealism of the picture. It is flighty and free-associative, rather than strictly sequential and sensible. One shot does not logically lead to another, the way it might in a "normal" film. Unmotivated close-ups and unexpected montages are the keynote here. There is one extremely drawn-out sequence in which several girls dance and strip to psychedelic music. I wasn't sure where this was supposed to be taking place or what connection it had with the rest of the movie, thereby making this montage reminiscent of the S&M "girlie" footage George Weiss clumsily added to the dream sequence in Glen or Glenda back in 1953. The purpose might have been the same here: to pad the running time.

• Getting back to the plot: Mrs. Riley calls Mac at the Brown Derby to hire him to find her daughter. This conversation, intentionally or not, is one of the movie's comedic highlights, as the performances are extremely stilted, and the dialogue seems to lurch forward too quickly, as if the actors are only reading every other line of the script.

• Mac visits the Rileys at their home. This is another quite amusing scene, as the detective tells the couple he gets "$200 a day plus expenses" and asks if they can afford that. The wife, who is reminiscent of Natalie Schafer as "Lovey" Howell on TV's Gilligan's Island, is offended by this and tells Mac that she and her husband are upstanding members of the community who always pay their bills. Her husband, Frank, is more direct: "We can pay." But Mrs. Riley won't let the issue drop and prattles on and on about what respectable people she and her husband are.

• When Mac asks them if they have any clues to their daughter's whereabouts, Frank remembers that Shirley had been reading a lot about the hippies and flower children. But she couldn't be associating with such people, her mother snobbishly insists, because she wasn't raised that way. Ed Wood, who also edited this movie, takes great pleasure in undercutting Mrs. Riley by juxtaposing this scene with footage of Shirley entertaining her male customers.

• Over at the brothel where Shirley is working, Madam Penny's Thrill Establishment, the other girls (including our pal Casey Larrain) are a bit annoyed that young Ms. Riley is getting the lion's share of the clientele simply because she's the new girl. It's worth pointing out here that Ed Wood has bestowed his own drag name on yet another female character. See also: Necromania (1970), Orgy of the Dead (1965), The Sinister Urge (1960), Killer in Drag (1963), etc.

• It's also notable that Shirley Riley is portrayed in this film as an irresistible seductress whom all men desire and all women envy. The actress in this role, Donna Stanley (aka Donna Nation, aka Donna Pussie), doesn't appear to have worked with Ed Wood before or after this film, but did have an active career in exploitation movies from 1969 to 1974, including a lead role in Nick Millard's Fire in Her Bed! (1972). She also worked with Eddie's pal, Don Davis, on the PG-rated Swamp Girl in 1971, where she acted alongside country star Ferlin Husky.

• It is also noteworthy that Madam Penny's employs at least one black prostitute, as African-American characters are extremely rare in Ed Wood's movies. I don't have a name for this actress, but other female cast members in Take It Out include: Linda Colpin, who also appeared in Love Feast with Ed in 1969; Monica Gayle, a softcore actress who graduated to TV roles (Fantasy Island, S.W.A.T.) in the late 1970s; and Lynn Harris, who's also in The Cocktail Hostesses (1973). Among the male clientele at the Thrill Establishment is Lou Ojena, the mummy from Orgy of the Dead. He's easily spotted because he's a large, imposing guy who's built like a linebacker. Look for him in a scene in which a couple has sex on a pool table and the other revelers just try to work around them and continue their game.

A Canadian travel poster from the film.

• By far, the single goofiest element of this movie -- and a major source of its entertainment value today -- is what Mac does after he agrees to take the case. Instead of doing any actual work towards finding Shirley, the detective decides to travel the world and charge everything to Frank Riley's credit card. I believe the total cost is something like $7500, which in today's money comes to $46,976.55. There are many shots of airports and travel posters throughout the film, something that is reflected repeatedly in the outtake reel. Mac's destinations include Greece, France, Italy, and Canada.

• And what does Mac do while he's in these exotic foreign countries? Mainly, he spies on naked women like a back alley pervert while hiding behind fences or shrubberies with an irrepressible grin on his face. How he's able to see these women is unclear, since he's outdoors and they're indoors. He doesn't take binoculars or any other "spy" equipment with him, though. Occasionally, he does manage to have sex with a few of these ladies, perhaps prostitutes. 

• Travel montages occur at several points in Take it Out in Trade, and they have almost no bearing on the rest of the movie whatsoever, apart from a few scenes in which Mac sends the Rileys postcards, updating them on his progress with vaguely naughty double entendres, e.g. "working on a hot tip." These scenes are so blatantly gratuitous and silly that viewers have no real choice but to give themselves over to laughter, and they're perfect examples of Ed Wood's "decoupage" style of filmmaking, as Maila Nurmi once dubbed it. The director even recycles some footage of a randy Frenchman being slapped by an offended mademoiselle. When Mac sees this scene twice, he explains to us, he knows it's time to go back home. 

• When Mac returns to America and actually gets cracking on the Riley case, he operates on the assumption that Shirley has dropped out of respectable society and wound up on the streets. His instincts are correct. Like all good detectives in these kinds of stories, Mac knows a few people in the criminal underground, and he starts his investigation by paying a call on Sleazy Maisie Rumpledinck (Nona Carver, also a supposed "Indian" in 1959's Revenge of the Virgins). Masie is an aging, broken-down junkie whore who lives on a very discouraging-looking street where soiled and discarded mattresses are accumulating outside.

• Mac says his flesh crawls every time he approaches Masie's foul abode, and his concerns are justifiable. When the detective arrives, Masie (who has a homemade "No Credit" sign on the wall) is with a customer: a dejected-looking, shirtless man who appears to be down on his luck. Once Mac and Masie are alone, he starts giving her the third degree. "You know all the girls on the streets!" It's actually quite remarkable how quickly the detective resorts to roughing her up to get the information he wants. Their roughhousing is so patently phony, however, that it's difficult to take offense.

Mac and Alecia in a rare calm moment.

• Suitably shaken, Maisie leads Mac to the next link in the prostitution chain, specifically a drag queen named Alecia played by the rather puffy-looking Ed Wood in a green sweater, a matching green skirt, white vinyl boots, and an ill-fitting blonde wig. Despite his lowly station in life, the haughty and still-proud Alecia tries to maintain an air of respectability and claims that he threw Shirley out of his house because she was such a wildly-behaved hellion. Mac treats Alecia the same way he treated Sleazy Masie Rumpledinck, and before long, Ed Wood does cough up some information to the detective about Shirley's possible whereabouts. Before he leaves, the decidedly ungrateful detective takes the opportunity to snatch the wig off Alecia's head. After his departure, the seething transvestite vows revenge against this cad. "He'll pay. Oh, he'll pay." This sequence is an obvious highlight of the film and one that more Ed Wood fans should have the opportunity to see.

• Onto the next set of pimps in the film's sexual food chain: a gay couple named (if I remember correctly) Paul and Henry. Compared to the lisping, limp-wristed "fag" characters in later Wood films like The Beach Bunnies and The Class Reunion, Paul and his mate are somewhat more realistic and believable, if not exactly respectable. They are involved in a prostitution ring, after all.

• The fiercely heterosexual Mac seems slightly agitated and impatient with this couple, so they introduce him to their so-called "house mother," a curvaceous and flirtatious blonde bombshell named Ruth who wanders around wearing skimpy, see-through lingerie (another Wood motif) and blatantly exposes herself to Mac within a few seconds of meeting him. In the screening I attended, Ruth's improbable sexual aggression towards Mac was another source of audience laughter. After Ruth and Mac spend some time getting to know each other intimately, Mac tells her it was all business between them, and she kicks him out.

• By this point, Mac knows all about Madam Penny's Thrill Establishment and heads over there, weakly pretending to be a customer. He puts almost no effort whatsoever into establishing his alibi, but this proves irrelevant, as Shirley and the gals have been tipped off about Mac by Paul. Shirley is paranoid about the detective's arrival, since she thinks it means trouble with the law. She therefore devises a plan: when Mac arrives, she and the other prostitutes will gang up on him and tie him up, tearing off his clothing and their own in the process. This is pure male wish fulfillment, and many minutes of screen time are devoted to showing Michael Donovan O'Donnell wrestling around with a half dozen nude and semi-nude girls. In the outtakes, you can see that O'Donnell achieves an erection, but nothing like this appears in the finished movie.

More "pink clouds."

• When she has Mac tied up and at her mercy, Shirley threatens to force him drink a cup of some beverage that will make him see "pink clouds." This is an expression Eddie used extensively in his 1967 novel, Devil Girls, again to describe the effects of narcotics. Mac assures Shirley that all he wants to do is take her back to her parents so that they can see she is alive and unharmed. She is amenable to this and agrees to accompany him. The potential conflict that had been building between Mac and Shirley for the entire movie is thus defused in a very anticlimactic way. It was really nothing more than a slight misunderstanding, possibly exacerbated by Mac's rough treatment of previous suspects.

• The suitably mind-boggling finale of the movie, however, proves that the real antagonists of Take It Out in Trade are wealthy, close-minded Mr. and Mrs. Riley, not their free-spirited daughter. Mac delivers the young lady to the family's very Brady Bunch-looking homestead, and the parents happily receive their prodigal daughter. But the merriment is short-lived, however, when Shirley announces her plans to return to Madam Penny's Thrill Establishment. 

• Things go further downhill, naturally, when Shirley opens her trench coat and playfully "flashes" Mom and Dad. Frank is outraged and tells Mac he won't pay him "one red cent." Mac's retort is one of the best closing lines in any Ed Wood movie: "Then I'll take it out in trade!" With that, he scoops Shirley up in his arms and carries her away as his reward for solving the case. As a movie buff, I couldn't help but think of John Wayne "rescuing" Natalie Wood in John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Also, by having Mac say the title of the movie in its final moments, Ed has craftily turned Take It Out in Trade into a "shaggy dog story" or, perhaps, a dirty joke with an 80-minute setup before the punchline. 

• Like seemingly one-fourth of all adult movies of the 1960s and 1970s, this one ends with a shot of a woman who has the words "THE END" painted on her bare bottom. Did every director who did this think he was the first to come up with it? Love Feast and The Undergraduate both conclude in this fashion.

And those, my friends, are my reflections on Ed Wood's Take It Out in Trade. Having finally seen this extremely rare motion picture, I can understand why Ed's widow, Kathy, referred to it in Nightmare of Ecstasy as a "cute little film," while Rudolph Grey deemed it a "major discovery." It's both.

Thematically, there's not too much to say. Once again, Ed was chronicling the counterculture -- a phenomenon he was too old and too out-of-touch to understand -- from the perspective of a horny middle-aged man. But this movie is much more forgiving towards the younger generation than many of Ed's other films and novels, and there is even some well-deserved razzing of the establishment, represented by Shirley's stodgy and status-seeking parents.

This is, quite simply, one of the happiest movies in the Wood canon. Compared to most of Eddie's X-rated films, especially those he made with Stephen C. Apostolof,  Take It Out is unusually playful and quick-paced, bawdy rather than raunchy, and refreshingly free of both rape and necrophilia. I got the feeling that Ed and his entire cast were having a dandy time making this movie. Michael Donovan O'Donnell, for one, is clearly enjoying himself all the way. 

And Ed Wood's giddiness shows through, not only as an actor, but as a writer, director, and editor as well. He strings scenes and images together with the intuitive yet illogical approach he applied to his most famous films from the 1950s, like Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space. And, once again, the responsibility for taking all of these ingredients and making something coherent or cohesive out of them falls on the audience. Maybe that's part of the secret of Eddie's enduring appeal: his work encourages active rather than passive viewership.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 19: "Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes" (1970)

Ed Wood as "Alecia" in Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes.

"You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string. You can do the same with a biography."

-Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984)

"When people ask me about my career, I always say to them, jokingly, that I am basing my career on Orson Welles. I started right at the top, and I am gradually working my way down to the bottom."

-British actor Stephen Calcutt (2002)

Critics and movie buffs tend to be neat freaks. Let's just admit it. The serious study of motion pictures is a field that attracts list-makers, scorekeepers, number-crunchers, trainspotters, and obsessive-compulsives. They're always ranking, cataloging, categorizing, and comparing movies, while habitually storing away utterly useless trivia in their memory banks in case it ever comes up on an exam. It seems to me that they're all hoping to get an A plus; they just don't know from whom yet. Enter into a conversation with one of these people, and you will inevitably find yourself in an inescapable quiz game, with each participant trying to dazzle the other with his or her mastery of cinematic arcana. ("Actually, I believe you will find that film came out in 1932." "It was made in '32, but it was not released until '33.")

Movie experts, by and large, appreciate order and neatness. They are systematic and fastidious people. Perhaps through art, they seek to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds them; the ritualistic listing, sorting, and grading of movies helps them do that. Those who critique films, both in the professional and amateur realms, know that certainty trumps ambiguity every time. Therefore, when penning their reviews and essays, these folks will freely intermingle facts and opinions, stating both with equal confidence. ("This director was born in 1956. His later movies are not as inspired as his early ones." One a fact, the other an opinion, both employing the same verb: to be.) 

"Rosebud!": Cinema's most mysterious demise.

The filmography of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. is a neat freak's nightmare. The man's career is, quite simply, a collection of holes tied together with string. No one knows for sure which or how many films Eddie made or didn't make during his thirty-year stint in Hollywood. Many of these films have gone missing. The others, the ones we actually can see and therefore review, serve only to further confound us. Are they trash? Are they treasure? And what do they tell us about the man himself? Was he a genius? A hack? An artist? A film-flam man? Mad genius or the worst director of all time?

Ed might have been remarkably self aware about his career and his own foibles, or he might have been sadly delusional, a Willie Loman figure lying to himself because the truth was too upsetting to face. There is evidence to support both conclusions. Even the woman who should have known him best, his wife of 22 years, Kathy Wood, has admitted that her husband remained an enigma to the very end, when he expired suddenly on December 10, 1978 after retreating to a back bedroom in the home of friend and actor Peter Coe. Kathy's last concrete memory of Eddie, in fact, is the look of unknowable horror that was frozen on his face at the moment of his passing. "What do you suppose he saw in those last few moments?" she later mused to biographer Rudolph Grey. "What do you suppose he saw?"

This deathbed intrigue reminds me of cinema's greatest and most mysterious demise: that of Charles Foster Kane, the character created and portrayed by Ed Wood's idol, Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane (1940). That entire film is devoted to deciphering Kane's last word -- "Rosebud" -- the baffling final utterance of a once-great man. Welles gives us in the audience an "answer" of sorts to this riddle by revealing that Rosebud was the name of Kane's childhood sled, but the reporter who has been researching Kane's life, Mr. Thompson (played by William Alland), never actually does find out what the word meant. In the film's last scene, now feeling only pity for Kane, he declares "Rosebud" ultimately irrelevant: "Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life."

Nor, I might add, can any one facial expression... or any one movie, for that matter. I suppose I've felt a lot like Mr. Thompson during this "Ed Wood Wednesdays" project, except instead of one "Rosebud," there are dozens of them to chase after.

"It's okay. I don't have an erection."

It is here that I take consolation in philosophy. Late author and mischievous pundit Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) advocated a brand of thinking he called "maybe logic," which acknowledges that doubt and uncertainty are inherent in the human condition. Nobody really knows anything, after all. We're all just guessing, using our imperfect sensory organs to gather data and interpreting that data with our equally imperfect brains. Our language, then, should reflect the subjectivity of existence. Instead of saying something like "Beethoven is better than Mozart" as if it were a factoid in an encyclopedia, Wilson would have us say, "Beethoven seems better to me than Mozart."

Appropriately, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (Dell, 1992), Wilson's philosophical manifesto in pseudo-screenplay form, contains several references to Ed Wood's inscrutable magnum opus, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). This witty and enlightening script appropriates scenes and images from any number of sources, including old movies, which Wilson then re-dubs and/or re-purposes to suit his ideological and comedic needs. In one representative scene from Reality (found on pgs. 76-77), Bela's Plan 9 stand-in, chiropractor Tom Mason, advances upon terrified housewife Mona McKinnon but reassures her, "It's okay. I don't have an erection." Just two pages later, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten appear as their characters from The Third Man (1949), only Wilson has them arguing about that great four-legged paradox, Schrodinger's Cat.

Two full years before Tim Burton's fanciful biopic did likewise, Robert Anton Wilson had gleefully juxtaposed Orson Welles and Ed Wood, all in his effort to thumb his nose at that stubborn old codger of a concept we call "reality." (And we cannot forget Jane Wagner's immortal and useful observation that "reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.")

I have started to come to terms with the fact that I will likely never "understand" Edward Davis Wood, Jr. I'm also making peace with the fact that, despite the best efforts of the completists and bean-counters of the world, many of Ed Wood's movies -- vast swaths of his filmography, really -- are not currently available for viewing. The gaps appear very early in his career and continue all through it. Here are some especially glaring omissions:

• Double Noose (1952) - A made-for-TV western Eddie scripted for Tom Keene.

• Boots (1953) - A 25-minute sequel to Crossroad Avenger, likely featuring the further adventures of the Tucson Kid. Ed might have also edited the two films together into a feature.

• The Night the Banshee Cried (1957) - A 22-minute dramatization of Ed's short story, likely intended as a TV pilot.

• The Autonetics Aviation films (circa 1960) - Ed's industrial training films, which he made for a California aviation firm that had secured a top-secret government contract. Ed writes about these in Hollywood Rat Race.

• Gun Runners (1969) - A feature-length crime film written by Ed Wood and directed by Don Davis (of For Love & Money fame).

• Operation Redlight (1969) - Another lost feature, this one written by Ed and directed by Jacques Descent.

• Excited (1970) - Yet another AWOL feature film written by Ed, this one directed by Gary Graver. 

• The Only House in Town (1971) - Originally thought to be an alternate version of Ed's Necromania (which is available), this is now known to be a separate movie written and directed by Ed Wood. While a planned DVD release from Fleshbot Films never emerged, the film has been located and will see the light of day eventually.

• Various XXX loops and mail-order sex educational films (1970s) - While some of these have surfaced online, there are dozens perhaps hundreds more that have not.

• Countless made-for-TV productions (1950s-1970s) - Seemingly made for Los Angeles television and aired only once, these programs were likely not preserved. You can find some titles here.

So that's what I'm up against, folks. But occasional miracles do happen from time to time, even all these years later! Adult movie collector Dimitrios Otis, for instance discovered an unedited print of Ed's The Young Marrieds, a hardcore feature from the early 1970s, several years ago, and that film has since been released to DVD (twice!) and has even had some public screenings since then. So there is still hope. For every advancement like this, however, there seems to be a corresponding retreat in the fascinating yet frustrating field of Wood-ology. Consider, for example, the movie under review this week...

TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE: THE OUTTAKES (1970/1995)

Alternate titles: None.

Availability: Ed Wood's Take It Out in Trade (1970) remains unavailable either legitimately or as a bootleg. Some silent outtakes from the film, however, have been compiled as Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes. This compilation is available from (where else?) Something Weird Video, either as a DVD-R or a download. Each is $10. SWV has padded the running time of the program to two hours by tacking on Ed Wood's Crossroad Avenger (1953) plus what amounts to a Something Weird informercial with clips from various exploitation movies organized into several categories.

The backstory: What kind of project could coax Ed Wood back to the director's chair for his first feature-length effort in ten years, thus ending the auteur's lengthy drought after The Sinister Urge (1960), a movie that warned us of the evils of pornography? Well, apparently, in the ensuing decade, during which he penned lurid novels and leering screenplays for the adult market, Eddie decided to heed the wisdom of a certain wise adage and join those whom he could not beat. The born-again director explained it himself in a 1971 issue of Sensual Films magazine:

The Pussycat chain's logo.

A year ago, I made my first film in the nudie racket. It was called Take It Out in Trade, and although it may be classified with an X rating, I kept away from any sexual contacts simply so that I wouldn't be lying in faking such a scene. It is simply filled with pretty naked girls which any private eye might meet. But I was able to make it real, and filmed it in real localities. This one will not be turned away from the box office.

As ever, Eddie's external optimism shines through in that passage. As you probably have already guessed, Take It Out in Trade was handily turned away from the few box offices it managed to reach. MarJon Film Distributors (the company behind Dracula Sucks, Orgy in the Ozarks and more) briefly listed this title in their catalog but never actually released it. It is possible, though unsubstantiated, that the film played at some of LA's infamous "Pussycat Theaters" as well as a topless bar in Glendale. Distribution outside of California seems to have been nonexistent.

Ed's euphemistic description gives you a vague idea of the film's basic plot: Detective Mac McGregor (Russ Meyer vet Michael Donovan O'Donnell) is hired by wealthy Frank Riley (Ed Wood stalwart Duke Moore) to find his missing daughter. She turns up in a brothel called "Madame Penny's Thrill Establishment," so the lucky detective gets to meet and bed a lot of pretty young ladies while investigating the case. Author Rudolph Grey, who discovered a print of the long-lost film in the early 1990s and made it one of the cornerstones of his book on Ed Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), described Take it Out in Trade as a "surreal sex comedy" in which "visual puns and slapstick are intermingled with conventional softcore sex scenes."

Kathy Wood had some memories of this "cute little film" (her words), which Ed made in early 1970, right before he and his wife lost their home at 6136 Bonner Street in North Hollywood. At the time, Kathy "wasn't quite in [her] own mind," due to the pressure of being evicted from her house. As usual, she lamented, this project didn't seem to be bringing in much (or any) money. Eddie, meanwhile, was typically absorbed in his work, staying up to all hours editing Take it Out in Trade on a Movieola machine in his den.

Having fired his original editor after an argument and not being much of an editor himself, however, Ed somehow got the audio and video out of sync at one point in the process and had to call his one-time Night of the Ghouls assistant Ronnie Ashcroft for help. When Ronnie arrived at the Woods' home that night, he found Eddie dressed in a pink nightgown with matching fuzzy slippers and initially mistook him for Kathy, despite his heavy beard. (Steven Apostolof shared similar memories of Ed dressing in drag even when he sported a beard.) Ronnie managed to look past this, though, and helped Ed sort out the technical snafu.

Nona Carver in her younger days.

The cast of Take It Out in Trade included some of the Woods' neighbors, plus the remarkable Nona Carver, who had been a headliner at the now-demolished Gaiety Theater at 523 Main Street in Los Angeles. Carver (described by makeup man Harry Thomas as a woman with "big bazooms but very thin little legs") was the ex-girlfriend of Ed Wood's friend and frequent star, Kenne Duncan, and was cast by Ed in the peripheral but memorable role of Sleazy Maisie Rumpledinck, a broken-down madam who in one scene is shown shooting up with a needle and a tourniquet. Before making this movie together, Nona and Ed had met several times through Kenne.

Rudolph Grey interviewed and photographed Ms. Carver for his book, in which the erstwhile actress recalled that Take it Out in Trade had been filmed over the course of a few days at a private residence in Lakewood, California. She had a few vivid memories of the principal photography, including an incident in which her overly-realistic screams in one scene had attracted the unwanted attention of the police.

She also gave Grey some insight into the film's typically Wood-ian origins. As she tells it, Ed Wood had met a man at a club who was looking to purchase some pornographic photographs. Always the huckster with the dynamite sales pitch, Ed convinced the man to put up a few thousand bucks for the production of a motion picture, and Take It Out in Trade was on its way to glory. Carver remembered there being two versions of the film: one softcore (which was "perfectly legit" and could be freely sold to distributors) and one hardcore (with scenes that could be cut out for the producer's "private collection").

The existing version on DVD-R.

For the male lead in the movie, Ed hired middle-aged, mustachioed Michael Donovan O'Donnell (with whom he'd later work on Steve Apostolof's ill-fated Hot Ice in 1978) to play the swaggering, macho private eye, Mac McGregor. O'Donnell based his portrayal on Raymond Chandler's famed Philip Marlowe character and recalled that, as a director, Ed Wood "gave you free reign" and "let you improvise a lot." This is consistent with most actors' accounts of Ed's hands-off, laissez-faire directorial style. While O'Donnell obviously loved this way of working, not all of Ed's actors were as comfortable with it. Plan 9 star Gregory Walcott, for instance, remembered that he had felt adrift during the making of that film, receiving no guidance whatsoever from its director.

Other Trade cast members included some of the same girls from 1969's Love Feast, including Linda Colpin and Casey Larrain. Based on the existing footage, it's clear that the movie also includes a gay male couple ("a couple of faggots," says Nona Carver). In fact, a scene of these two men kissing in a kitchen was the very sequence Eddie had been trying to cut together when he got into a fight with his editor! Ed Wood himself has a major role as a tranvestite named "Alecia," though from the available footage I could not really tell how Ed's part fit into the larger jigsaw puzzle of the movie.

In any event, after its brief, ignoble run in Los Angeles in 1970, Take It Out in Trade was largely forgotten and did not achieve a videotape release during the home video boom of the 1980s. Rudolph Grey's extensive coverage of the film in Nightmare of Ecstasy was the most attention it had received in twenty years, and fans naturally expected that the "rediscovered" film would soon be out on VHS and (later) DVD. Nothing of the sort happened, though. Then, in one of those historical quirks so common to the Ed Wood saga, three reels of silent outtake footage from the film were discovered in the projection room of a movie theater in Santa Monica in 1995. These reels became the basis for the patchwork version of the film which is available to consumers today

The viewing experience: What's it like watching this video? Well, it's like watching an hour-plus of silent outtakes from a porno movie, that's what. Though Hal Guthu's cinematography is workmanlike and not at all fussy or artistic, the existing footage from Take It Out in Trade is surprisingly watchable and visually interesting. The brightly-lit images are clear and in focus, and the colors still pop, which is important because of the film's often garish costumes and decor. But don't get your hopes up too high, partner. This is still raw, unedited stuff. No effort -- and I mean none -- has been made to organize this footage or shape it into any semblance of a cohesive, chronological narrative.

Much of the footage is repetitive or uneventful, and some scenes are repeated again and again with virtually no noticeable variation. There aren't even any opening or closing titles. The program starts suddenly and unceremoniously, and a little over an hour later, it ends just as suddenly and unceremoniously.

Something Weird Video has done viewers a service by at least adding a hip, vintage soundtrack, mostly instrumentals like "The Hell Raisers" by Syd Dale, plus kitschy 1960s versions of golden oldies like "Take the A Train" and "I'm in the Mood For Love." One song on the soundtrack seemed to be a note-for-note ripoff of "Loop De Loop" by Johnny Thunder, only with the lyrics changed so that it was about doing the limbo, while another was a bluesy lament from the perspective of a sunbather. The compilers of this video have kinda, sorta attempted to time the music to the action onscreen or the general mood of the footage, but this is inconsistent.

Bottom line, if you're hoping for a viewing experience even remotely close to that of watching a narrative feature film, you're going to be disappointed by Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes. In a just world, this would be a DVD extra -- the kind you'd maybe watch once.

Paul Schrader's Hardcore: Ed Wood did it first!

But this is not a just world, so Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes is the only visual evidence we have of an entire feature film written and directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr. What will you see if you sit through all three reels of silent footage? The central plot -- a rich couple hires a detective to retrieve their daughter, who is working at a brothel -- is actually comprehensible from the footage on hand. That part, I would have been able to guess even without consulting Nightmare of Ecstasy.

The story of a young daughter from a respectable family somehow winding up in the sex business and then being found and "rescued" by a male hero presages two high-profile screenplays written by Paul Schrader: Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979), both of which were intended as variations on John Ford's The Searchers (1956).

But Ed Wood has a twist on this plot! When the detective returns the daughter to her mother and father, they are naturally overjoyed to see her. The mother and daughter hug affectionately, and all three members of the family start talking to one another. But then the daughter takes off her coat to reveal that she is wearing only panties underneath, shocking her parents by blatantly baring her breasts to them. Naturally, they express their outrage over this. For some reason, Ed Wood must have filmed many, many takes of this scene, as it recurs at least eight times in the outtakes. Some iterations (though not all) end with the detective taking the nearly-nude girl in his arms and carrying her off caveman-style to some unknown destination.

What else will you see in Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes? Naturally, there are many glimpses of the production's clapperboards, i.e. the hinged wooden slates that "clap" shut at the beginning of each take. From studying the writing on these boards, we can glean the name of the production (Take It Out in Trade), its director (Ed Wood), its cinematographer (Hal Guthu), the dates it was shot (January 14-16, 1970), and the numbers of the various scenes. So at least we know that Eddie was working from a standard screenplay and was not merely "winging it." I would guess that, like the making of The Sinister Urge ten years earlier, the production of this film was orderly and businesslike. Since this DVD is a disorganized jumble of footage more than anything else, I will merely enumerate some of the other details that jumped out at me during my viewing:

• Like Love Feast, this movie features a lot of shockingly red décor -- namely, little accents here and there that stand out against the white walls. Above all, viewers will probably remember the fuzzy, red "shag" carpeting on the stairs of the brothel. There are many shots of young women, either nude or wearing flimsy lingerie, ascending and descending this narrow staircase. Elsewhere, these cute but bored-looking gals are seen lounging around, playing records and sitting on a couch. Ed's famous fixation on sheer, lacy nightgowns comes to the fore here.

• First and foremost, this is a "skin flick" for frustrated middle-aged men, so there is abundant female nudity -- yet again, mainly toplessness -- on display. Generally, the nude women are either prostitutes, bed partners for the detective character, or both. There are several cutaways to another couple romping in bed, but it is never established who these people are or how they fit into the overall film. 

• Ed's eroticizing of death continues here as well with the prominent appearance of a metallic skull. Skulls are one of the more persistent motifs of Ed's work, as are snakes. The bronzed cobra from Love Feast also reappears here.

• The homosexual couple is not presented in an entirely negative light. One is more traditionally masculine and has a modified pompadour. The other is androgynous and has a wavy hairdo. He seems to play the more feminine role in the relationship, as we see him wearing an apron and preparing a salad in the kitchen. This scene reminded me very much of the transvestite Alan/Ann from Glen or Glenda? (1953). Ed Wood also depicts the (fully clothed) couple kissing as the macho detective watches from a distance with either boredom or low-key hostility.

• It was nice to see Duke Moore -- he of "Inspector Clay's dead... murdered... and somebody's responsible!" fame -- back again. He looks a little older here but basically unchanged. I felt embarrassed for him, though, as he was "flashed" by his fictional daughter again and again to the apparent delight of the detective on the case.

• Speaking of our detective friend, his bushy sideburns and mustache unfortunately reminded me of Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), so I had trouble accepting him as a sexual being. Like the characters in Love Feast, the detective winds up wrestling around with a bunch of nude women on an overloaded bed, and like Ed Wood's "Mr. Murphy" from that movie, the detective finds himself at the mercy of the young women at one point. (I think they tie him up against his will. It's not 100% clear whether the bondage is consensual.) 

• Nothing these people do on that bed actually resembles sex, but the actor does sport an erection anyway -- the first of its kind to appear in any of the Ed Wood films I've reviewed for this series. But Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes is definitely softcore. If this production yielded any hardcore footage, it is not depicted in this compilation.

• Apparently to establish the fact that the detective is a world traveler, there are several shots of airplanes taking off and landing, plus a few cutaways to travel posters displaying the names of countries he has allegedly visited. The most exciting location footage, though, is a shot of Los Angeles' famed Brown Derby, an establishment that looms large in the Ed Wood saga. Maybe the private dick goes there to meet a client or something. Having not seen the full movie, I couldn't tell you.

• For what it's worth, Ed Wood looks a little healthier here than he did in Love Feast. I don't think he was ready for any marathons, exactly, but he'd seemingly lost some weight and did not appear as bloated. His character, a drag queen named "Alecia" is glimpsed in one location: parked on a lumpy couch in a nondescript room, usually alone but occasionally being grilled by the detective.

•  Wood sports a blonde wig, makeup, a sleeveless green mock-turtleneck sweater with matching green skirt and necklace, stockings, and white vinyl go-go boots. The detective divests him of the wig in one take, and Ed himself removes it and throws it toward the camera in another. Without sound or any real context, it's difficult to assess Ed's performance.

So there you have it, folks! Watching Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes was a mildly rewarding and somewhat educational experience for me. If you are truly curious about Ed Wood's return to directing after a ten-year hiatus, this program will provide a little bit of insight. Mostly, though, it will make you wish that the full-length Take It Out in Trade, complete with audio, eventually finds a general release on DVD so that this work may be more properly assessed.

Next week: Oh, have I got a fun movie for you next time, space cadets! Filmed in 1966 but not released until 1970, this loony American/Japanese horror film was based on a script by an unbilled Ed Wood (according to Wood himself!) and is perhaps his last significant effort at writing an old-school "creature feature." This one basically follows the template of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), except that its monster is flora, not fauna. Bounced around from distributor to distributor and known by a variety of titles, most of them quite inaccurate and misleading, this charmingly obscure motion picture eventually found a comfy home in the public domain and has been made freely and easily available to the public. Mark your calendars for 11/20/13, which is when I'll discuss Venus Flytrap (1970).