The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 20: Pages from Ed Wood's script for The Hostesses (1973)

A detail from the Cocktail Hostesses poster.

What are you even doing here? Don't you realize that, at this very moment, you could be buying a genuine vintage screenplay for The Cocktail Hostesses (1973) for a mere $1,450? Talk about a bargain! You remember The Cocktail Hostesses, right? The Ed Wood-written, Steve Apostolof-directed softcore film that's so widely beloved that it's never received a proper DVD release, not even as part of the Big Box of Wood collection? Right, that's the one. Your Christmas won't be complete without it!

Jokes aside, it's difficult for me to get terribly enthused about The Cocktail Hostesses, even though I coauthored an entire book about its director. Back in 2020, I said it was only my 35th favorite Ed Wood movie and my least favorite of the Wood-Apostolof collaborations. Why is that? Although I'm always glad to see the late, great Rene Bond in a leading role, The Cocktail Hostesses is so sleazy and sordid—not to mention marred by a totally gratuitous rape scene—that I find it too depressing to be much fun.

Still in all, if someone gifted me that $1,450 Cocktail Hostesses script, complete with handwritten notes by one of the actresses in the film, I'd probably die of happiness. There's no way in this world I could ever afford it. Luckily, some snapshots have been posted online. How about we take a look at them and see if we find anything interesting, huh? We'll start with the cover page.

The cover of The Hostesses.

Okay, right away we see that The Cocktail Hostesses was originally called just The Hostesses and its script was credited solely to Ed Wood. In the completed film's end credits, Steve Apostolof (as A.C. Stephen) is listed as the film's coauthor. (How much writing Steve actually did on this picture, I don't know. My guess is, not much apart from maybe giving Ed Wood a story outline.) Note, too, that the film has been given a production number: "Prod. #113."

This particular copy of the script seems to have belonged to someone named "Kriss Kross," who is playing the supporting role of Lorraine. In the finished film, this character is portrayed by model-actress Kathy Hilton (1947-2015). Kathy is known to have worked under various aliases, so perhaps "Kriss" is one of them. In any event, Steve Apostolof filmed The Cocktail Hostesses in October 1972. We can see that the dates written on this cover match up with the calendar. (October 22 was a Sunday that year.)

It looks like this actress has been asked to show up at a place identified only as "Reubans" at 3:00 in the morning. Apostolof's usual cinematographer, Robert Caramico, shot The Cocktail Hostesses under the name "R.C. Ruben," so perhaps this note refers to him. Also, I'm pretty sure our actresses has been asked to supply her own red party dress, presumably for the late night orgy scene.

Next is merely a title page:

The title page of The Hostesses.

Not much to say here, except it's amusing to me that a script for a low-budget softcore porn movie should have both a cover and a title page. Talk about formality! Note, too, that The Hostesses is listed as "An A. - A. PRODUCTIONS Presentation." This is the production company name Steve Apostolof used for both Drop Out Wife (1972) and The Cocktail Hostesses, though both were released under the SCA banner.

At last, we get to the good stuff, i.e. the first scene of the picture:  

Page 1 of The Hostesses.

What happens on this page is basically what happens in the finished movie. Young secretary Toni Rice (Rene Bond) makes love to her boss, Mr. Henderson (Norman Fields), in the latter's office. Once they finish, they start dressing and have a little conversation about their relationship.

In the final cut of the movie, Steve Apostolof adds an establishing shot of the office building that's not indicated in Ed's script. Also, while dressing, Rene Bone improvises an extra line to fill up the time: "Boy, it's been a long day!" (This ends up being the first line of the film, apart from some grunts during the sex scene.) Other than that, there's no real difference between page and stage, so to speak.

Twice on just this page, Eddie leaves some detail "to the discretion of the director." That was a common notation in his screenplays for Steve Apostolof, perhaps indicating the writer's level of respect for his director and patron. For one thing, Ed says that Steve can decide how much of Mr. Henderson's naked body to reveal. As it happens, actor Norman Fields (whom I don't think of as "ruggedly handsome") does appear fully frontally nude in the finished movie.

The scene continues:

Page 2 of The Hostesses.

Not much to note here. Rene Bond and Norman Fields deliver this dialogue pretty much as Ed Wood wrote it, though they make it a little more natural and conversational by changing a word here and there. The essential meaning is kept intact. They do skip the "until next Friday" part entirely, though.

We now jump forward a few pages in the script:

Page 5 of The Hostesses.

Toni is now bemoaning her fate to her friend Jackie (gap-toothed Terri Johnson). She's sick of earning just $86.91 a week to be "poked, probed, sodomized, and debauched." (Never the most accurate of typists, Ed misspells the last one as "debached.") Jackie tells her to ditch that office job and become a cocktail waitress/escort. 

Again, the actresses largely deliver what Ed Wood has written. But Rene Bond does give her own spin on the "sick and tired" rant. Here's what she says in the finished movie:

I'm sick and tired of it... and all for what? NOTHING, just nothing! Them with their wife and kids, and all I get out of it is a big zero. Being a secretary is rotten. I just get nothing out of it.

Terri Johnson's response is also a little different from what's on the page:

"I'd say it's about time. You keep screwin' with that boss of yours and for what? Absolutely nothing! You figure it this way. I made thirty dollars alone in tips last night. And afterwards, I had the most delightful time with an out-of-town buyer. He made me fifty dollars richer."

See what I mean? Compare those quotes to the script page, and you'll see that what they're saying is similar to what Eddie wrote but not exactly the same. Maybe Steve Apostolf gave his actors seem leeway when it came to dialogue. Maybe, if we want full-tilt, unfiltered Eddie, all of his screenplays are going to have to be published just as he typed them 50 years ago.

But this article has already gone too long. I'll be back tomorrow with a few more script pages and commentary from The Hostesses.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, Week 25: "The Cocktail Hostesses" (1973)

Rene Bond serves up alcohol -- and herself -- to drunken businessmen in A.C. Stephen's The Cocktail Hostesses.

"The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails."

-Federico Garcia Lorca

"To me, being grown-up meant smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, and dressing up in high heels and glamorous outfits."

-Lorna Luft

Blondes hiding their nipples: An SCA trademark.

Way back in 1998, satirical mock-newspaper The Onion published a brief but memorable article called "Taco Bell's Five Ingredients Combined in Totally New Way." The fictional story explained that the fast food chain was planning to use refried beans, ground beef, cheddar cheese, lettuce, and a corn tortilla in an "exciting new" menu item called the "Grandito." The company's CEO promised that this delicacy would be a complete departure from such previous Taco Bell offerings as the "Mexiwrap" and the "Zestito," both of which were (of course) made from the exact same five things.

After watching my fourth consecutive SCA Distributors softcore sex film from the early 1970s, I'm beginning to think of SCA as the cinematic equivalent of Taco Bell. Director Stephen C. Apostolof and writer Edward D. Wood, Jr. were essentially combining the same basic ingredients over and over again in slightly different ways. While Ed and Steve's first collaboration, Orgy of the Dead (1965), is a complete left-field oddity with bizarre characters and a spooky setting, their films from the 1970s tend to be more homogeneous, just a lot of pasty white Californians halfheartedly pretending to hump each other in blandly-hideous bedrooms, motel rooms, and living rooms, while drowsy "beautiful music" drones on in the background. Same actors. Same props. Same busty blonde on the poster, coquettishly hiding her nipples from our view. Even some of the same (basic) shots and dialogue reappear.