Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 24: "The Snow Bunnies" (1972)

A moment sorta like this but not really happens in A.C. Stephens' The Ski Bunnies (1972).

Sybil: Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton were telling me about California. You can swim in the morning, and then in the afternoon, you can drive up into the mountains and ski. 

Basil: Must be rather tiring.

-Fawlty Towers ("Waldorf Salad," March 1979)

New takes on Dracula.

Irrelevance. It was breathing down Ed Wood's neck in 1972. If the world had ever needed his services in the past, it certainly didn't now. The old school Universal horror and science fiction films he favored were distinctly out of fashion, except as filler on late-night television. Ed's biggest career coup had been getting Bela Lugosi -- Count Dracula himself -- to star in a string of low-budget films back in the 1950s.

But 1972 was the year that William Crain's Blacula distinctly and unmistakably politicized the Bram Stoker tale by depicting the famed count (Charles Macaulay) as a racist who refuses to help a proud African nobleman, Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), in his quest to end the slave trade. Instead, Dracula cruelly transforms Mamuwalde into a vampire, glibly renames him Blacula, and seals him in a coffin where he slumbers for nearly 200 years before emerging to wreak havoc in 1970s Los Angeles. Never before had the screen witnessed a black vampire. Never before had Dracula's race even been an issue.

It's interesting to note that the men who unwittingly unleash Mamuwalde upon LA are two fey homosexual decorators, Billy and Bobby, who end up as the African vampire's first victims. These characters are not unlike the limp-wristed, lavender-scented sissies who turned up in Love Feast (1969) and Take it Out in Trade (1970). We were ready to accept a vampire as a symbol of racial pride by 1972, but "fags" were still acceptable hors d'oeuvres for a movie monster.

Nevertheless, a gauntlet had been thrown down: the Dracula story had been dragged out of its 18th Century dreamland and deposited forcefully in the Here and Now. To audiences of 1931, Bela Lugosi's character may have been a darkly romantic antihero. To audiences of 1972, he was just another old white man in a big house on the hill, a symbol of racial oppression. Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula aka Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974), further politicized the Stoker story but concentrated on class struggle instead of racial warfare. Here, Count Dracula (Udo Kier) was an enfeebled aristocrat who met his doom at the hands of a virile Bolshevik laborer (Joe Dallesandro) in 1920s Italy. Meanwhile, England's Hammer Studios, who had been Dracula's most faithful cinematic caretakers since Universal, were trying to keep their franchise alive by transporting Drac to swinging modern-day London in the tellingly-titled Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972).

Even the Duke bites the dust.

Eddie might have taken some consolation in the fact that one of the biggest grossing films of '72 was a John Wayne starrer called The Cowboys. In all probability, horse operas were closer to Ed's heart than flying saucers, vampires, and zombies combined. He preferred the term "cowboy pictures" to "westerns" and liked the black-and-white moral certainty of the cheap, primitive morality tales he'd grown up with. None of this "revisionist western" or "adult western" nonsense for Ed Wood. No, sir. He liked his cowboy movies straight up, no chaser. He assayed the form frequently, mightily, and without success in the first few years of his career and kept casting old Hollywood cowhands like Bud Osborne, Tom Keene, Johnny Carpenter, and of course Kenne Duncan in his movies for years, regardless of genre. Poor Kenne intentionally overdosed on barbiturates in '72, thus depriving Ed of another close longtime friend.

As late as 1973, after all hope for becoming the next Zane Grey was long extinguished, Eddie wrote the wistful, fact-based short story "Pearl Hart and the Last Stage" for his buddy Charles D. Anderson's anthology, Outlaws of the Old West. History does not record whether Ed Wood ever saw The Cowboys, but if he had, he might have been appalled by the picture's infidelity to its own heritage by killing off John Wayne's character in an unsatisfactory way. In a January 1972 review, Roger Ebert explained:

The Cowboys has violated a Western convention. It is a sacred belief of the genre that good guys never miss, and bad guys never hit. The bad guys can pour a rain of lead into a besieged position and hit nothing more than a lantern or a whisky bottle, even by accident. But then all a good guy has to do is pop up and squeeze the trigger, and a villain bites the dust at 200 yards. The Cowboys tries to get around the convention by depriving Wayne of a chance to shoot at all, and disarming his dozen or so teenaged sidekicks. He's killed while he's unarmed (and after having already beaten the daylights out of a man thirty-five years his junior).

With Dracula being co-opted by the counterculture and unarmed cowboys being gunned down on movie screens across America, Ed Wood can be excused for feeling a little woozy in 1972. By then, the only sector of the film industry that would still have him was porn. The last refuge of a filmic fuck-up. And wouldn't you know it? Even that was under siege! Sure, this was the era when it was temporarily okay, even fashionable, to take your wife to a movie theater and watch a thirty-foot-tall Linda Lovelace deep throat Harry Reems on the silver screen. "Porno chic," they called it, and for a hot second it looked like it might even seep into the mainstream. 

Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial and widely-discussed Last Tango in Paris (1972) was a non-porn film whose sex scenes were still sufficiently believable to warrant an X rating. It starred Marlon Brando, who was then reconquering America in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). Was Tango the future of motion pictures? Real sex or real-enough sex in movie houses everywhere? Would more "big name" stars follow Brando's lead? Nobody seemed to know.

Eddie had made a hardcore feature of his own a year before anyone had heard of Linda Lovelace, but there wasn't anything particularly chic about Necromania. With its Dracula-inspired Gothic trappings, it was proudly unfashionable, even somewhat sweetly nostalgic. Besides, Ed was a day tripper in the hardcore scene. It was a mere avocation. His true vocation was softcore, a subgenre which had not quite breathed its last in '72 but was certainly coughing and wheezing by then. Thanks to cable and VCRs and their bottomless appetite for topless girls, softcore would make a Dracula-esque reemergence in the 1980s, but Eddie wouldn't be around to see it. In 1972, making a feature-length "nudie cutie," especially one with no apparent topical or social relevance, was just about the least hip career move you could make.

Yet that's just what Ed Wood did, penning another script for his old cohort, Stephen C. Apostolof aka "A.C. Stephen." I picture the two men clinging to each other for warmth on the deck of the Titanic, possibly hoping to use the buoyant Marsha Jordan as a flotation device, as they made this week's film...