Ed Wood extra! 'Chiller Theatre' (1965) and 'Oh! Those Bells' (1962)

Vampira and Dr. Tom Mason in the intro for WPIX's legendary Chiller Theatre.

If you don't mind, I'd like to share with you some Ed Wood-related TV treasures from the early 1960s. The first dates back to 1965 -- a half-century ago.

While Eddie was toiling on Orgy of the Dead, clips of his 1959 epic Plan 9 from Outer Space featuring Vampira and Dr. Tom Mason were being used in the opening montage of the legendary Chiller Theatre on New York's Channel 11 WPIX, an independent station, along with snippets from The Cyclops and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. WPIX had been running horror movies under the Chiller Theatre banner since 1961, but the Wood-centric opening did not turn up until 1965, coinciding with the departure of host Zacherly "The Cool Ghoul."

WPIX had a strong signal and was well-known in those days to viewers throughout the so-called "tri-state area," encompassing New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It is conceivable, then, that Chiller Theater had a major impact on the baby boomers who grew up in that area of the country, introducing them to the joys and terrors of horror films. The Saturday night show might have scarred some kids for life.

One such victim/beneficiary was New Jersey-born writer Rob Craig, who grew up to be the author of the exhaustive study Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Look at the Films. In an extensive interview included in the newly-published The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood, Craig talks at great length about the Chiller Theatre intro and the impact it had on his life. He began watching the WPIX show when he was eight years old and became entranced with it. "Like any self-respecting baby boomer," he said, "I was completely enamored of monster movies." The Chiller Theatre intro became such an object of fascination for Craig that, fifty years later, he could easily rattle off all the movies quoted within it.

But one particular excerpt stood out among the rest, as Craig explained to the Cinematic Misadventures authors:

"However, the one clip which really resonated with me -- and which I would not identify for many years -- was a very strange scene showing a sexy young woman with a tight black dress, long black hair, heavy makeup, and long dark fingernails. This sexy/creepy monster woman was walking towards the camera in a menacing way, with a deranged grimace on her face. Now, to an eight-year-old monster movie buff -- it may sound funny to say now -- but I found that clip extremely creepy. The woman's grimace indicated some sort of madness or evil which really unnerved me. It was an interesting combination, I think, of sex and horror."

You can probably guess the rest of the story: Rob Craig finally saw Plan 9 from Outer Space years later and had an epiphany when he finally recognized the mystery woman who had been haunting his dreams since childhood. Watching the intro, which was retired in the late 1960s, I can definitely see why the WPIX show affected Craig so strongly. The Plan 9 clips are right at the beginning of the montage -- unmissable, unmistakable.

Removed from its original context, the footage is genuinely unsettling and provocative all at once. It's darker and grainier than the current DVD version, which makes it a little more sinister. Furthermore, WPIX has added its own bombastic library music to the montage, underlining the sense of dread. Perhaps most importantly, the Plan 9 footage only lasts three seconds. A shot of Vampira standing still in the graveyard. A shot of Tom Mason standing still in (apparently) the same graveyard. Then back to Vampira, who approaches the camera with her arms out in front, as if she's reaching for the viewer directly through the TV screen. There's no time to process any of this. It's almost subliminal. Did I just see that?

Here, more so than in the full-length movie, the ersatz Dracula is as scary as the real thing. It really helps when you don't get a good look at him. And Vampira is sex and death made flesh, Eros and Thanatos in one body. The viewer is simultaneously attracted and repelled. I want to fuck her! She's going to kill me! So many conflicting thoughts, so little time.

Ed Wood's favorite show?

The second clip for today is the intro from a very obscure, extremely short-lived sitcom called Oh! Those Bells, which ran on CBS from March 8, 1962 to May 31, 1962. According to The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946-Present by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh: "This series was a loosely structured attempt to bring contemporary slapstick humor to television. The Wiere Brothers, an internationally known trio of slapstick comedians, portrayed the last living members of a family with a long history as theatrical prop, costume, and wig makers."

Veterans of the vaudeville circuit, the three Weire boys -- Herbie, Harry, and Sylvester, all born in Germany and Austria-Hungary in the early 1900s -- had a long-running, free-wheeling comedy and music act which kept them afloat for decades in show business. The Pathe newsreel cameras captured their onstage antics a few times in the 1930s in films which still exist today. The boys started appearing in feature films in the late 1940s, working with stars as diverse as Roy Rogers and Bob Hope, before moving into television in the 1950s and 1960s, where they turned up on The Merv Griffin Show and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. The anarchic act came to an abrupt, sad end with the death of the youngest brother, Sylvester, at the age of 60 in 1970. Perennial guest stars, the Weire Brothers were perhaps too aggressively madcap to be the main attraction in any TV series or film. Oh! Those Bells was their one big shot at stardom, and it lasted a mere thirteen low-rated weeks.

The show's creator, Jules White, was famous for having directed dozens of Three Stooges shorts at Columbia. I guess he thought he'd try his luck with another knockabout trio. Eh, they can't all be winners. Oh! Those Bells, in fact, did garner comparisons to the Stooges, some positive and some negative. Brooks and Marsh again: "When things started to go wrong, their world looked like it had been taken over by The Three Stooges in their prime" But in their book Harry and Wally's Favorite TV Shows, critics Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik declare: "Oh! Those Bells shows that slapstick died for a reason: It comes across as awfully stupid on TV. Watch an old Three Stooges short instead." Ouch.

Unsuccessful as it may have been, Oh! Those Bells did have at least one major fan: Edward Davis Wood, Jr., as always the patron saint of show business underdogs. Eddie would have needed all the laughs he could get by 1962. That was one of his relatively fallow periods. His last theatrically-released motion picture, The Sinister Urge, had been in the can for two years by then. His most recent directorial efforts were the top-secret industrial films he made for Autonetics Aviation. His screenwriting gigs on Shotgun Wedding and Orgy of the Dead were still in the future, as was his backup career has an author of cheap paperbacks. I can just imagine poor Ed in 1962, sitting in front of the TV and waiting in vain for the phone to ring... if he even had a phone.

Oh! Those Bells must have struck Ed's fancy, because he wrote about it affectionately in Hollywood Rat Race, circa 1965. A chapter boldly titled "Sex -- Hollywood and You" begins with these words:

"What makes an actor or actress? I can't define the magic of acting with any facts or logic. I do know, as do most of you, that if something happens on the screen that I like, then I like it, if it's an actor or actress, then I like him or her. (I liked the television series The Bell Brothers starring the Bell Brothers, but it seemed few others liked it -- the ratings shooed them off the air. Does that make them any less talented as actors? I wouldn't think so, their nightclub dates are at an all-time high.)"

Eddie, though well-meaning, has his facts slightly scrambled. The show was actually called Oh! Those Bells, not The Bell Brothers. The real-life Wiere Brothers portrayed the fictional Bell Brothers on the show. It is true, however, that the Wieres remained a popular live attraction throughout the 1960s, even if they weren't able to translate that popularity to steady TV success.

But now, dear readers, pretend that you are Ed Wood in the spring of 1962. It's Thursday night, you've just done an uncredited script polish on Married Too Young, and it's time to kick back and watch the ol' tube, most likely with a glass of Imperial Whiskey in your hand. You tune to KNXT Channel 2 (the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles at the time), adjust the rabbit ears, give the cabinet a few whacks for luck, and wait for your favorite new show to flicker into view. And here is what awaits you:

Ed Wood's affection for Oh! Those Bells is instructive to the aspiring Wood-ologist. A person's television-viewing habits say a lot about him. You are what you watch. As an experienced stage actor and playwright, Ed likely would have appreciated Bells' theatrical setting. And the focus on wigs, costumes, and props would have been a selling point, too. (Wood rhapsodizes over these things in his short story "Final Curtain.")

But more importantly, this little biographical detail gives you an idea of what Ed found funny. From the antics of Paul Marco's bumbling Kelton the Cop in Wood's '50s films to the Bazooka Joe-worthy groaners in One Million AC/DC, it's clear that Ed Wood had a taste for low comedy. He liked his jokes corny, obvious, and old-fashioned. No wonder the Wiere Brothers suited him to a T. This is a sticking point for some viewers. Both Ed Wood, Mad Genius and The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood gripe about Eddie's attempts at cornball comedy. I don't mind it, personally. I even find it kind of sweet, because it attests to Eddie's inner sincerity and naivete.

Since that Oh! Those Bells intro up there is rather brief, I thought I'd include the following clip to show you more of the Wieres' vaunted nightclub routine. Here, then, are the Wiere Brothers performing in the late 1960s on a Jerry Lewis TV special. A very tan, tuxedo-clad Jerry describes them as "three men who follow in the great tradition of the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, and the Smith Brothers." Lewis obviously had some lingering respect for the Wieres, because he cast middle brother Herbie Wiere in his film Cracking Up in 1983. That was the last major public appearance of any of the Weire Brothers. Sylvester, of course, was long gone by then. The eldest of the trio, Harry, died in 1992. Herbie followed in 1999. And that, as they say, was that.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 60.5: A roundup of Wood news!

The cover of a soon-to-be-released book about Ed Wood's movies.

NOTE: It had been my intention today to present my findings on Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970), an extraordinary film whose cast features Mr. Edward D. Wood, Jr. However, some heavier-than-expected work commitments have forced me to reschedule that posting. Rather than shortchange Mrs. Stone's Thing with a sloppy or incomplete analysis, I have decided to postpone that article one week. It will appear in this space on May 20, 2015. In the meantime, I have accumulated a few bits of Ed Wood-related news which I wanted to present to you. Please enjoy. - J.B.

Try as he might, our boy Eddie just can't stay out of the news for long. You might think that it would be easy keeping up with a guy who's been dead since December 1978, but that's just not the case with Mr. Edward Davis Wood, Jr. You see, dear readers, Eddie's is a restless spirit which the afterlife simply cannot contain. That's the only explanation I can offer for the man's remarkably busy post-death career. 

The actress Valda Hansen, who sexily starred in Eddie's 1959 classic Night of the Ghouls, repeatedly claimed that she had felt the ghostly presence of Ed Wood in her life and that Eddie had appeared to her in her dreams long after his demise. 

While he was alive, Eddie repeatedly wrote stories and scripts about supposedly "dead" people who enjoy no solace in their own graves. The female narrator of "The Night the Banshee Cried" is summoned back to our world, for instance, to haunt the grounds near her ancestral family home. The protagonist of "Into My Grave," on the other hand, is able to give us a blow-by-blow description of his funeral as it happens. The dancers in Orgy of the Dead, all purportedly deceased, are condemned to thrust and gyrate for all eternity in order to please Criswell, Emperor of the Dark World. The scam artists in the aforementioned Night of the Ghouls are so adept at pretending to contact dead people that they inadvertently manage to attract some of the genuine articles. And, of course, Plan 9 from Outer Space has its trio of shambling human zombies in the thrall of some snooty space aliens. Death, then, is rarely "the end" in an Ed Wood story.

I don't wish to give the impression that there is a geyser or deluge or downpour of Wood news to share. It's more like a slow, steady trickle which never quite ends. If you have a slightly leaky roof and you leave an empty bucket on the floor beneath the source of the seepage, the water will accumulate deliberately, drop by drop. After a while, when the bucket is full or half-full, you can dump it out and start over again. That's basically how I deal with the Ed Wood-related news items which accrue in my e-mail inbox: I let them build up for a while, then dump 'em out all at once.

To wit:

I. A new book about Ed Wood is on its way.

A body of work: These are among the films covered in The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood.

The big news, obviously, is the imminent release of a brand-spanking-new, career-spanning critical study of the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood (Bear Manor Media) by Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt, Jr. is scheduled to ship on June 15, 2015. That's just over a month away, folks! Ted Newsom, the director of the Wood documentary Look Back in Angora and the genial host of the Big Box of Wood DVD collection, provides the book's foreword. The cost is about $35 for the hardcover edition and $25 for the paperback. Tonally, this looks to be rather less formal and academic than Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius from 2009, but the general scope of the new book seems to be about the same as Craig's. The focus is on Ed's canonical feature films as a director and writer. The book's Amazon page states that the authors will be "providing in-depth looks at the 29 existing films written and/or directed by Wood." While Craig's book is largely quite serious, this one claims to be "hilarious and reverential." We'll see. I'd certainly be curious to learn which movies constitute "the 29 existing films" in the eyes of Messrs. Rausch and Pratt, since I'd put the total at around 40.

In any event, The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood is a book long in the making. I first heard about this project way back in January 2014, when Andrew Rausch was a guest on the Projection Booth podcast for an episode devoted to Orgy of the Dead. Rausch's subsequent health problems have likely delayed the release of Cinematic Misadventures, and for a while I thought the book had just vanished into the ether, but now it looks like it's really going to happen. I can't wait to read it. Here, for the curious, is Bear Manor's official description:

Coming June 2015! 

Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), a critically acclaimed film starring Johnny Depp that earned two Academy Awards, only told part of the fascinating story of the strange American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and film editor. Now, authors Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt Jr. unreel the unreal back stories of the much-maligned “Worst Filmmaker of All Time” and his 29 films that sometimes outshone Wood’s off screen shenanigans.

In the 1950s, audiences cringed at Glen or Glenda, Jail Bait with Steve Reeves, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space with Bela Lugosi, The Violent Years, and Night of the Ghouls. In the 1960s, moviegoers winced at The Sinister Urge and Orgy of the Dead. Though his films sometimes shocked the delicate sensibilities of post-war audiences, modern moviegoers often love the good, bad, and ugly movie millstones. 

The authors share a passion for all things Ed Wood and wanted to explore, deplore, and implore the always unvarnished facts about the born loser, who continually defied odds to achieve each scrap of success in Hollywood. Wood refused to allow his dreams to die, despite the seemingly-insurmountable hurdles he faced in life and with his own lack of talent, yet he found a way to continue making movies. Discover his daring deeds in detail, from the crowd favorites to the more obscure nudie films that Wood made late in life. 

Illustrated. 293 pages, 42 chapters, and 10 interviews with a variety of people involved with Ed Wood films.

Rausch, incidentally, is the author of such books as Dirty Talk: Conversations with Porn Stars (2015) and The Godfather of Gore Speaks: Herschell Gordon Lewis Discusses His Films (2012). Wood fans, however, will likely take note of another intriguing title in Rausch's back catalog. In 2008, he co-wrote Gary Graver's Making Movies with Orson Welles: A Memoir. Welles, of course, was Eddie's role model and hero, as memorably depicted in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Graver, on the other hand, directed the Wood-scripted (and still missing) Excited in 1970 and may have been the cinematographer on One Million AC/DC in 1969. That makes him one of the few people who worked with both Ed Wood and Orson Welles! A fascinating figure, this Gary Graver, and one definitely deserving of further study. Meanwhile, though I may be looking in the wrong places, I cannot find any other books by Charles E. Pratt, Jr.

II. So what happened to Ed's possessions after that auction?

Anyone who has been following the Ed Wood Wednesdays series will know all about the recent auction of Eddie's personal belongings which took place in Boston back in March. I was very excited about it at the time, especially the prospect of bidding on Ed's monogrammed trunk from the 1950s. Apart from some old movie posters and lobby cards, however, I didn't win anything from that particular sale. Too rich for my blood, as they say. But who did end up with that stuff? 

Well, I was contacted recently by Jason Insalaco, the grand-nephew of Plan 9 actor Paul Marco. Jason is the one who helped restore Ed Wood's Final Curtain pilot from 1957, which makes him a saint in the field of Wood-ology. In his e-mail to me, Jason wrote: "I recently purchased Ed's personal items, including many items from western star Kenne Duncan that Ed inherited." He also sent me a link to a very neat Los Angeles Magazine article about the auctioned items and how Jason was sorting through them, along with Ed Wood scripters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. And at the beginning of this month, Ed Wood's co-heir, Bob Blackburn, posted to an Ed Wood Facebook group about the items. Bob knows a lot more about this subject than I do, so I'll let him take over for a while:

A peek inside Ed Wood's suitcase.

Okay, so yesterday I met up with Jason Insalaco, a friend I have known for about 10 years or so. Jason is Paul Marco's grand nephew. Some of you may know that he and his friend found and restored a copy of  Final Curtain that was shown at the Slamdance Film Festival a couple of years ago. I brought him a CD of the current music in the Ed Wood musical, some of which I'd given him about four years ago when I first got involved with Rick Tell. So the basis of our get together was twofold. We hope to be able to work together in the future to display some of the items we both have related to Ed Wood. I have a few, and Jason, well, now he has the mother lode! Yep, it was he who won the trunk filled with Ed's personal items in the auction last month. he already has a ton of items from Paul, including Paul's working script for Bride of the Atom, yep, under the original title, as well as tons of photos. Now he has the trunk. He brought with him a few items to show me, one of Ed's scrapbooks with unpublished 8x10 B&W production photos from Grave Robbers [from Outer Space], also clippings and ads for [The] Violent Years, I Changed My Sex, etc., etc. It was/is amazing, and this is the tip of the iceberg. 

Ed Wood's personal letterhead.

I hope to get together with him with in a few weeks to see the collection in person. He said Ed was the executor of Kenne Duncan's estate and there's a lot of material from there, which he and I hope to take over to [actor and Wood associate] David Ward to show and get his thoughts and comments. There are a lot of photos that have never been published. He also showed me Ed's resume, which I only have a copy of. This was Ed's personal copy. He was surprised that the lot didn't go for more, as I would assume most of us were. 

But I know just from seeing the small amount that he brought me, that the overall value if sold separately would be close to that $20,000-$30,000 that the auction house thought it would sell for. Anyway, I asked him if I could mention his name on here, and he said that was okay. We hope to work together down the road. Would love to screen some of Ed's films here in L.A. and have a lobby exhibit, and also sell a few copies of Blood [Splatters Quickly], but I had to share as I was sooooooooooo excited that the trunk is with someone who has a connection to Ed through Paul Marco and who is now the owner of the largest collection of Ed Wood memorabilia in the world. I can say that because it's true. I hope we can get some pictures up here, and I would love to see if Joe Blevins might be able to see this and write about it. Anyway, there ya go. Will keep this group up to date on whatever I can regarding this goldmine.

Thanks for the news, Bob. We'll be waiting to see what eventuates from this.

III. Yes, the Plan 9 studio is for sale.

Interested in a real estate investment? This place is for sale if you want it.

Read all about it in L.A. Weekly. 

An interesting bit of Los Angeles real estate hit the market recently: 5628½ Santa Monica Boulevard. Back in the 1950s, this was the site of Quality Studios, a tiny little cheapjack soundstage where Ed Wood filmed portions of Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Anyone who has seen the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion (1992) will be instantly familiar with this particular spot, because the filmmakers visited it and brought actor Conrad Brooks along for the ride. It didn't look like much when Conrad visited back then: just a dark little room at the back of an alley with a broken cymbal on the floor. That last detail makes sense because, after its days as a movie studio were done, the building became a rehearsal space for rock bands. Musicians including the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Guns N' Roses are said to have played there. I don't know whether they did or they didn't. Conrad Brooks remembered that Quality Studios was next door to a bar called Gold Diggers. Remarkably, that extremely skeevy-looking establishment was still standing in 1992 and even seems to have survived to 2015. Such longevity!

I know that this will be terribly old news for anyone who is even vaguely interested in Edward D. Wood, Jr. You're probably all sick to death of this item by now. But you know what? I maintain an Ed Wood-themed blog, and this was sent to my inbox about half a dozen times, so I figured I had to include it here at least once. And now I have.

IV.  Here's an Ed Wood DVD set worth purchasing!

A good purchase for $10.

This is not "news" in the traditional sense, just an interesting little discovery I made last week. As if I don't have enough Ed Wood detritus in my life and in my apartment, I occasionally browse through Amazon looking for more of it. What can I say? It's a sickness. 

Recently, I decided to take a gamble on a two-disc DVD set from Passport Video called The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence. It carries a 2007 copyright, but I remember something very similar to it in the DVD bargain bins back in the late '90s or early 2000s. I never purchased it back then, but I decided I had to have it now. For some reason, Amazon's price has shot up very recently to the $30-$50 range, but I was able to get it for less than ten bucks (shipping included) on May 4, 2015. 

Anyway, it contains six films (Glen or Glenda? Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, Jail Bait, Night of the Ghouls, and The Violent Years), plus a little documentary featurette called The Ed Wood Story with Dolores Fuller, Johnny Depp, and Martin Landau. I haven't gotten around to viewing that quite yet, but I did make a cursory examination of the films themselves and was delighted with what I found. Though the transfers are just adequate and carry an "Ed Wood Collection" watermark in the corner, the Passport Video versions contain some material which I had not seen on other Ed Wood DVD sets. Namely:

• Jail Bait is presented in the Rhino Video "Director's Cut," meaning that the minstrel show footage has been replaced by saucy striptease footage. According to Rhino, the burlesque sequence was "discovered when the long-lost negative was unearthed." All previous DVDs of Jail Bait that I've ever seen contain the Cotton Watts and Chick routine from Ron Ormond's Yes Sir, Mr. Bones (1951).

• The Violent Years actually has a title sequence featuring a still shot of the girl gang. The Big Box of Wood version, the only one previously in my collection, skipped this altogether and started with the chalkboard scene. Score two for The Ed Wood Collection!

• Most amazingly of all, the cut of Glen or Glenda? is not the censored, shortened version on the Wade Williams and Legend Films DVDs. I'll have to make a more thorough study of this DVD, but it seems to be the longer version I remember seeing back in the 1990s. Anyway, it passed my initial test. Whenever I get ahold of any digital copy of Glenda, either in disc form or streaming on the Internet, I immediately fast-forward to the first big scene with Timothy Farrell as Dr. Alton and Lyle Talbot as Inspector Warren. Then I wait for the part where Farrell says, "Yes, but I wonder if it rated the death warrant it received." In the longer version of the film, Farrell adds, "I don't think so." Meaning that he doesn't think a transvestite deserved to die. In the censored version, after Farrell says the words "death warrant it received," the film cuts immediately to Lyle Talbot saying, "Well, that's why I'm here today, doctor." Passport Video's version was the first DVD to pass my test.

And that, my friends, is all the Ed Wood news I have for now. The bucket is empty. Time to set it back down on the floor and let it fill up again. 

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.