Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 261: More about 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951) and other things

A typical New York sunset, as (not) seen in The Sun Was Setting.

When I started writing this series of articles back in July 2013, my plan was to blitz through Ed Wood's filmography in just a couple of months. And so, I covered a great deal of territory in each article. In the very first week alone, I briefly covered Ed Wood's youth in Poughkeepsie and reviewed Crossroads of Laredo (1948), The Sun Was Setting (1951), Crossroad Avenger (1953), and even Eddie's failed attempts at making TV commercials in the late 1940s. That's absolutely nuts. Nowadays, each one of those topics would get its own individual article, perhaps more than one.

Cut to January 2026. I'm now giving greater attention to these and other topics related to Ed Wood. Last week, for example, I did a deep-dive into Ed's 15-minute made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting. This strange story, centering around a terminally-ill New York woman (Angela Stevens) who cannot leave her apartment, was the one and only production of a short-lived company called W.D.B.C. Films that Eddie formed with his pal Don Davis and two other men, Milton Bowron and Joe Carter. Bowron and Carter were Los Angeles real estate salesmen who never dabbled in show business again. (I'm guessing it was a "fool me once..." situation.)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 260: The lingering mysteries of 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951)

Angela Stevens swoons in the arms of Tom Keene aka Richard Powers.

History can play some funny tricks on us. Circa 1947, for example, a twentysomething ex-Marine named Ed Wood migrated from Poughkeepsie to Hollywood with dreams of becoming part of the motion picture industry. But that was just when an upstart called television was becoming a serious threat to the movies. 

The earliest scheduled TV shows, including such mainstays as The Texaco Star Theatre (1948-1956), The Lone Ranger (1949-1957) and The Ed Sullivan Show (aka Toast of the Town) (1948-1971), all came into existence during this time. I Love Lucy, another game changer, debuted in 1951. Clearly, it was a time of upheaval in the entertainment industry.

An unsold pilot.

And so, Ed Wood's early resume is littered with attempts to break into television, almost entirely without success. Many of his hopes were pinned on his friendship with Tom Keene (real name: George Duryea) (1896-1963), a handsome if somewhat bland New York actor who had been a prolific B-Western star in the 1930s and '40s. In the 1950s, television was overrun with cowboy shows, and Keene guested on several of them, including Judge Roy Bean, Hopalong Cassidy, and Corky and White Shadow. 

Given Tom Keene's name recognition and past success, Eddie thought a weekly Keene series was a slam dunk, so he kept making pilots starring the actor such as Crossroad Avenger (1953) and The Showdown (1952), all of which went unsold. Some of these did see the light of day, though, on anthology shows like Cowboy Theater that served as dumping grounds for orphaned pilots. In those days, there wasn't a lot of content to go around, and TV stations had to fill the hours with something.

Around this same time, Keene and Wood were involved a very different sort of TV production, one that had nothing to do with cowboys, Indians, or the range. The Sun Was Setting (1951) must be considered one of the true oddities in the Ed Wood filmography: a soapy 15-minute melodrama about a terminally-ill woman named June (Angela Stevens) who cannot risk leaving her New York apartment, though she desperately wants to. Keene, billed as "Richard Powers," costars as Paul, June's loving but understandably nervous boyfriend. And Phyllis Coates, just a year away from playing Lois Lane on the first season of The Adventures of Superman, rounds out the cast as June's supportive friend, Rene.

What makes The Sun Was Setting so unusual is that it is a straight drama, something Eddie rarely if ever attempted in his career. He made horror films, sci-fi films, Westerns, crime thrillers, and countless adult movies over the course of 30 years in show business, but The Sun stands apart from everything else on his resume. One wonders, then, why Eddie made this little movie. What were his hopes for it? Where did he think it would lead?

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 141: The strange journey of the 'Glen or Glenda' theme

Bill Lava beams with pride upon learning his music is used in an Ed Wood movie.

Ed Wood rarely had the luxury of working with a composer on his films. From one end of his directing career to the other, with the exception of Bride of the Monster (1955), he had to rely on so-called stock or library music, occasionally to great effect. Who can forget Trevor Duncan's bombastic "Grip of the Law," which plays during the opening credits of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)? Or Hoyt Curtin's queasy, discordant music heard throughout Jail Bait (1954)? Today, though, I'd like to turn your attention to a bit of stock music that Ed used not once but twice: "Presenting the Doctor" aka "Secret of the Silent Hills" by William Lava (1911-1971).

The end of the line for Looney Tunes.

If you know William Lava's name at all, you're probably a fan of classic cartoons. Bill is best known as the composer for Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes series from 1962 to 1969. Unfortunately, these were the dying days for that franchise, so William Lava's name is on a lot of uninspired, cheaply-made cartoons. If you've ever suffered through a lackluster Cool Cat or Bunny & Claude short, you were listening to Bill's music. 

Cartoon historians tend to take a dim view of William Lava, comparing him unfavorably to his predecessors, Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn, and dismissing his music as "mechanical." It's important to remember, though, that Bill was working under relatively spartan conditions during his Looney Tunes tenure. Theatrical cartoons were less in demand in the 1960s, largely thanks to television, and their budgets shrank accordingly. Sometimes, these cartoons would even be scored with stock cues that Bill had composed previously. The original Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series finally petered out with the abysmal Injun Trouble (1969), and Bill himself passed on two years later at the age of only 59.

It was an ignoble end to a surprisingly varied and interesting career that merits further attention. What can you say about a man who co-wrote the theme for F-Troop (1965-67) and composed the score for Al Adamson's notorious Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)? He was no slacker, that's for sure. A Minnesota native, Bill Lava arrived in Hollywood in 1936 and soon embarked upon a career writing music for radio, film, and (eventually) television that would keep him busy for the rest of his life. Until he became associated with animation, laboring on both Looney Tunes and Pink Panther, Bill was never confined to one genre. In his early days, he scored comedies, dramas, Westerns, and more. 

In 1940, Bill wrote the music for RKO's The Courageous Dr. Christian, the first entry in a five-film series starring Jean Hersholt (yes, the namesake of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) as a crusading doctor. Over the opening credits of this medical melodrama, we hear a lush, orchestral theme known as "Presenting the Doctor." 

In 1951, Ed Wood brazenly purloined "Presenting the Doctor" and used it as the theme song for his soapy made-for-TV short, The Sun Was Setting. The film credits no composer, certainly not Bill Lava, but Eddie gave himself a credit for "Music Arrangement," suggesting perhaps that he personally selected this bit of stock music. He must have been especially pleased with this choice, because he re-recycled "Presenting the Doctor" as the theme to his debut feature, Glen or Glenda (1953). Decades later, Howard Shore cleverly quoted "Presenting the Doctor" in his score for the biopic Ed Wood (1994). If you own the soundtrack album (and you should), you can hear the Glenda theme in the tracks "Ed and Kathy" and "Ed Takes Control."

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, week 48: 'Rudolph Grey Presents: Short Films, Home Movies, and Other Miscellanea' (2014)

Manhattan's Anthology Film Archives.

Well, folks, I guess there is going to be an "Ed Wood Wednesdays" column this week after all, but it's not the typical sort of heavily-researched, carefully-constructed piece I usually do for this series. Instead, while the memories were still semi-fresh in my brain, I wanted to record some thoughts and feelings about attending the penultimate night of The 10th Dimension: Edward D. Wood, Jr., a week-long retrospective currently running at Manhattan's Anthology Film Archives (AFA). The AFA is not your typical movie theater. Instead, it's a nonprofit center for the preservation and exhibition of offbeat and rare films.

As its name suggests, in addition to holding screenings, the AFA is also a vast storehouse of films and videos, preserving these artifacts for future audiences. This year, in addition to a slew of other programs, the center decided to honor the work of Edward D. Wood, Jr. They've shown films both famous (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and obscure (Nympho Cycler) from Ed's entire career, with selections from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Tonight, Wednesday, September 17, was a very special show -- the linchpin of the entire festival, in fact -- because it was an assortment of rarities hosted by Rudolph Grey, author of Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992).

In order to give this article some semblance of structure, I'll break down my reflections by sub-topics.

I. ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES itself

The Internet was a good friend to me this time around.  Though the Comfort Inn where I'm staying is not exactly a five-star luxury resort, it is within easy walking distance of the AFA. So thank you, Internet, for finding this place and suggesting it to me. And special thanks to Google for providing easy-to-follow walking directions, even though I somehow managed to get lost several times on the way there and the way back because I have no innate sense of direction. You know that inner compass that most people seem to have? Mine was removed surgically at birth. New York City doesn't give you much help either, by having "1st Street" cross "1st Avenue" and "2nd Street" intersect with "2nd Avenue." I had to traverse all four of these similarly-named arteries to get from my hotel to the Archives.

I actually passed the AFA a few times because, with its red brick exterior, it looked more like a church or a school than a cinematheque. In fact, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong about these things), the building used to be a courthouse before the film archivists moved in during the late 1970s.

This gives you an idea of what the
AFA's screening rooms are like.

Once inside the building, I noticed how humble and unprepossessing the lobby was: just a small waiting area and a lonely ticket booth with a bearded, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing dude inside. The biggest thrill for me, at least initially, was seeing that they had the New York Times article that mentions me displayed at poster size in the lobby. I mentioned this to Mr. Beard-O, and he just kind of shrugged and said, "Cool." He told me he hadn't bothered to read it and didn't really know which poster I was referring to. What can you say to that? It takes the wind out of your sails a bit, certainly.

I was getting a "semi-amateurish, mom-and-pop" kinda vibe from the Archives, but I could see traces of professionalism there as well. They show movies on at least two screens, for instance. One theater was located up a couple of flights of stairs, while another was on the ground floor. Every Wednesday seems to be devoted to showing the work of new filmmakers. I got there in plenty of time to see this week's chosen newbie: Shawn Batey's hour-long documentary, Changing Face of Harlem. The crowd was polite but very sparse. Unperturbed, Ms. Batey herself was there to introduce and explain the movie, which chronicles the rise and decline of Harlem, along with the gentrification that threatens to dilute the neighborhood's identity and drive away poor and middle-class African-Americans. Batey said she'd been working on the modest but provocative documentary for about 14 years now. The screens at the AFA have an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, but they are large, and the picture and sound quality are both quite good. Provided they promote the screenings themselves, young directors might well consider the New Filmmakers night at the AFA as a viable showcase for their work.

But this was all happening upstairs. Downstairs was where the real fun was brewing. A decent-sized crowd turned out for the program I'd come there that evening to see -- Rudolph Grey Presents: Short Films, Home Movies, and Other Miscellanea. There were enough spectators on hand to fill up the ground floor theater at the AFA. Let us now venture into the dank, humid depths of that exhibition.

II. RUDOLPH GREY, host/curator 

Rudolph Grey as he appears in Dad Made Dirty Movies.

I'd never met Rudolph Grey, musician and author, before this. But I'd certainly read his book, Nightmare of Ecstasy, countless times and seen him in documentaries like Jordan Todorov's Dad Made Dirty Movies (2012). So I recognized him instantly. I'd describe him to you as a combination of Tom Waits, a 1940s film noir detective, and mid-1980s Bob Dylan. Giving off an air of jaded, world-weary cool, he seems to hide behind his fuzzy hair, scraggly beard, and crumpled posture. But he's not imposing or intimidating in any way. He looked benign enough, so I thought to myself, "What are the odds that I'm ever going to be in the same room as this guy again? I have to say something."

This turned out to be a miscalculation. When I walked into the AFA screening room, Grey was seated in the first row, puffing on an e-cigarette and resembling a new millennium Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. I approached him with a smile on my face, told him how many times I'd read his book, and then stumbled through some semi-coherent explanation of who I was and what "Ed Wood Wednesdays" was all about. He was anything but interested and gave me the dreaded Queen Victoria "we are not amused" look. So I backed off, humbled, and went dejectedly back to my seat. Whoops.

Despite this initial setback, Rudy's presentation was funny and informative nevertheless. This is a man who has clearly done his homework (hundreds of interviews, he claims), and once you get him started talking about a topic that interests him, he can be downright effusive. But he can become taciturn or inscrutable at a second's notice, too.

The evening was co-hosted by a film historian somehow connected with the Anthology Film Archives -- a well-spoken, professorial, middle-aged guy with a neatly-trimmed beard and rimless glasses. (His name eludes me. Sorry.) I got the impression that he and Rudy were friends or at least had some history together. Generally, he asked open-ended questions, and Rudy either answered them or tried to answer them. You could tell, though, that the professorial guy had to do a little work to coax the answers out of Rudy, and there were a few times when the proceedings threatened to grind to a halt. Odd conversational hiccups abounded, you might say. 

Rudolph Grey doesn't say reassuring things like "yes" or "definitely." Speaking with a heavy New York accent, somewhat reminiscent of Peter Falk as Lt. Colombo, he's more likely to cut you off with "sure" (his favorite expression) or "right" or "of course" and then not say anything else after that unless you give him more prompting. (A typical exchange might go: "Is your apartment full of tapes from old interviews?" "Sure.")

Still in all, the conversation was chock full of valuable information for the aspiring Wood-ologist. Some highlights:

• Rudolph Grey first became aware of Ed Wood in the early 1960s when Plan 9 from Outer Space and (later) Bride of the Monster started airing on local television in New York. But back then, he had no idea about the man behind the movies. "It was just a name to me."

• Grey believes that Eddie's reputation as "the worst director of all time" started in the 1960s with such horror magazines as Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein, which would run stills from Eddie's movies like Plan 9 with derogatory captions. Despite this, Eddie considered Ackerman a friend. These film magazines, aimed at what Grey called "nerds," were where the "bad movie" cult around Ed really began.

• Harry and Michael Medved's Golden Turkey Awards book brought Ed a lot of negative postmortem publicity and made Grey's work difficult in the early 1980s when he began his research into Wood's career. Nobody connected to Ed wanted to talk to Rudolph Grey because they didn't trust him or didn't understand his motives. Kathy Wood, Ed's widow, was especially hesitant to talk to Grey but eventually relented. 

Richard Bojarski's book.

• Ed died, Grey said, just as Glen or Glenda? was catching on in a few cities as a cult movie. "Bad timing," he concluded. Grey didn't realize that, during the late 1970s, he could have just looked up Ed's name in the Los Angeles telephone directory and found him that way. By December 1978, Ed was dead, and it was too late. Rudolph Grey never got the chance to meet or interview Edward D. Wood, Jr. One author who did was Richard Bojarski, who talked to Wood in 1977 as part of the research for his own book, The Films of Bela Lugosi (1980). Bojarski generously shared his archival material with Grey. I believe some the taped interviews that Bojarski did are excerpted in the movie The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. 

• Grey bristles at the term "oral history," even though that's what Nightmare of Ecstasy really is. He says he chose the format of the book -- which consists of a string of quotes from Wood's friends and associates with very little commentary from Grey himself -- because writing a straight prose biography had not worked and, besides, he wanted to preserve the speech cadences of the people he interviewed. He modeled Nightmare of Ecstasy after Jean Stein's Edie: An American Biography (1982), a book about Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick.

• One of Rudy's first big accomplishments in his research was landing an interview with Ed's mother, Lillian Wood. Grey speculates that Lillian did not really understand what her son's life or career were like. When Grey showed her a picture of Bela Lugosi, for instance, she said, "Oh, I know him!" Wood also had a sibling, a brother, who was always jealous of Eddie and didn't want to talk about him. In deference to Lillian, Rudy left the brother alone.

• Vampira, he says, started out as something of a snob. But he talked to her for hours anyway, and eventually she admitted that she had misjudged Ed Wood.

• Since the initial publication of Nightmare of Ecstasy, most of the interview subjects have died. The plus side to this, Grey contends, is that he can now publish an updated, expanded version of the book with anecdotes that would have given people heart attacks back in '92. Pressed for an example, Grey mentioned a blabbermouth starlet who claimed to have been Ed Wood's lover.

• The material being shown in this evening's presentation came from a group of films discovered at Los Angeles yard sale several years ago. Some Wood-related documents were also found at this sale. It was quite an extraordinary cache of Wood memorabilia. And speaking of those precious artifacts, let's get to them now.

III. THE FILMS

Tonight's program consisted of : two complete television productions, Final Curtain (1957) and The Sun Was Setting (1951), plus an extremely rare outtake reel from The Sun Was Setting with dialogue that didn't make it to the finished version; the generic but lovable Story-Ad television commercials (1949); about 15-20 minutes worth of Ed Wood's personal home movies; and finally the hysterical, Wood-narrated trailer for Fugitive Girls (1974). I have already done thorough write-ups on most of this material, so please follow the links to the appropriate articles to read my thoughts on these.

It was tremendously satisfying seeing all of these rare movies on a big screen with an audience. People came to this evening for a variety of reasons. Along with the die-hard Wood-ologists, including your humble narrator, there were those who simply wanted to watch something "weird" or "campy" or "so bad it's good." I even heard a few people behind me talking about other Wood films they'd seen and speculating that Crossroad Avenger (1953) must have been either written or edited by someone else because it wasn't offbeat enough to be Eddie's work. I refrained from correcting them on this point, but the truth is that not everything Eddie did was like Glen or Glenda? or Plan 9 from Outer Space.

One thing I learned from this evening, however, is that Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s work inspires laughter to this day. That's just a fact of life. Even though you may not want to mock or belittle Eddie, it is difficult to keep a straight face throughout the entire running time of Final Curtain, in which Dudley Manlove's apoplectic and absurdly flowery narration is juxtaposed with shots of bulldog-faced Duke Moore pretending to be bug-eyed with fear. The film moves so incredibly slowly, with Moore obsessing over each little detail in the darkened theater where the entire story takes place -- the lights, the windows, the seats, the stairs, the railing, the hallway -- all to compensate for the fact that virtually nothing is happening onscreen.

The same is true for The Sun Was Setting with its hambone acting and soap opera dialogue. The essential premise -- that the heroine, who seems perfectly fine, even vigorous, is so delicate that going nightclubbing in "the Village" for an hour would kill her -- is so stilted and unbelievable that the audience cannot help but giggle a little.

The berserk trailer for Fugitive Girls may have been the biggest hit of the night, with its nonstop barrage of shameless ultraviolence and hopelessly square references to "flower children" and "lesbians." Ed Wood's own narration contains a truly staggering number of sensational adjectives. The descriptive words just keep coming without mercy! Eddie must have written his copy with a thesaurus by his side!

IV. AFTERTHOUGHTS

Ed Wood at home.

On a more reflective note, the home movies are an incredible find. I'd seen some of this material before, but nothing like what was shown tonight. It was mostly from celebrations and holidays -- a string of birthdays and Christmases, all in the warm California sun. Along with the expected shots of Ed and Kathy Wood, you get glimpses of Valda Hansen, Kenne Duncan, Duke Moore, David Ward, and Tom Keene, along with many other unidentifiable folks -- friends and neighbors, most likely. There are many minutes of footage of Ed Wood in drag, both "camping it up" at parties and trying on various dresses, girdles, and sweaters at home.

Grey said that these films were probably made for Eddie's own private amusement and that the late director probably would not have wanted them included in a retrospective of his work. But here we were, watching them in New York City in 2014. Initial laughter gave way to awed fascination. These home movies give the modern viewer some insight into the private life of the Woods and show that the couple indeed had some happy times before those tragic last years of theirs. One recurring motif, for instance, is dogs and the happiness they bring to the lives of humans. The Woods and their friends were seemingly all "dog people," judging by these movies. Above all, they loved to see dogs imitate human behavior, whether that meant hopping around on their hind legs or eating birthday cake with a fork.

Everyone's smiling and laughing in these silent movies. Most of the time, they appear drunk, and they probably were. But there's something melancholic about them, too, because they seem like relics of a world that has passed away and cannot be recovered. Once again, I am reminded of Roger Ebert's so-called "8mm omen," which states that movies that begin with old home movies are rarely about happy lives. Ain't it the truth, brother?

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 1: The Early Years (1948-1953)

Ed appears in one of his own commercials, circa 1949.

When Edward D. Wood, Jr. arrived in Hollywood in 1947 at the age of 23, he'd already had plenty of life experience. Or at least he said he did. The ambitious young man claimed to have seen heavy combat action in World War II and been decorated for gallantry in action, though his actual military record suggests otherwise. (In truth, his duties were mostly of a clerical nature.) Eddie also boasted that he'd traveled with a freak show as a "half-man, half-woman" and studied the dramatic arts at the prestigious Frank Lloyd Wright Institute in Washington, D.C. None of that has ever been confirmed either.

It's difficult to know what is true and untrue when discussing the early life of Ed Wood. He took an active role in cultivating his own myth, and even his widow Kathy described him as a consummate "bullshitter."

The son of a mailman and a jewelry buyer, Ed was born into a middle class family in Poughkeepsie, NY on October 10, 1924. His mostly unremarkable childhood was changed forever when his father gave him a movie camera for his eleventh birthday. Eddie also claimed that his penchant for dressing in drag stemmed from his childhood. Supposedly, his mother Lillian would dress him as in girls' clothes as a peculiar form of punishment throughout his formative years. This is yet another unsubstantiated story in the legend of Ed Wood.

The camera fueled Eddie's obsession with cinema that had begun with his viewing of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi in 1931. The cross-dressing, meanwhile, became a lifelong habit for Ed and a major theme in his work as both a director and writer. One could argue that the fetishizing of all things feminine -- not only women's clothing, but their hair, makeup, jewelry, movement, physiognomy and physical contours -- is the defining characteristic of Ed's films and novels. While a few of Ed's characters dealt with the issue of transvestism directly (e.g. Glen in 1953's Glen or Glenda?), many more had an obsession with "feathers, furs, and fluff," to borrow a phrase from Ed's script for Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Ed Wood's birthplace, 115 Franklin Street in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Patriotic and hungry for action, Ed joined the Marines at the age of 17 in 1942, America's first full year as a belligerent in the Second World War. He was finally discharged in 1946.

The war had not extinguished the romantic, movie-loving side of Ed Wood's personality. Far from it. He was still an enthusiastic "idea man" and a handsome, dapper young gentleman in the Errol Flynn tradition when he made the trip west to California to pursue his show business aspirations in the late '40s. With no connections whatsoever in Hollywood, Ed began his new life as a stage actor. Within a year, he had made two very important professional associations: one with Monogram Pictures cameraman Ray Flin, who would become the first major cinematographer of Ed's career, and the other with fellow actor John Crawford Thomas, with whom Ed briefly formed a production company.

It is with Flin and Thomas that Ed made his first film in Hollywood (he'd made home movies as a child, but nothing of significance), so it is there we begin our journey into the filmography of Edward D. Wood, Jr.


CROSSROADS OF LAREDO (1948)

Don Nagel as Tex in Crossroads of Laredo (1948). Ruth McCabe comforts him.

Alternate title: The Streets of Laredo

Availability: The Haunted World of World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Image DVD, 1996) [buy it]

The backstory: As a child, Ed was especially interested in cowboy movies and attended them regularly, so it is natural that his first attempt at filmmaking would be in the western genre. Ed wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in this feature, but it would never be completed or released in his lifetime. Ed shot the film without sync sound and, according to all participants, got every bit of footage he needed to tell the story. He intended to add, according to Rudolph Grey's book, "cowboy ballads and sparse dubbed dialogue" on the soundtrack, but this was never carried out. Stories differ as to why. Actor Chuck La Berge, who played the Sheriff in the film, claimed that producer and financier John Crawford Thomas was "nutty as a fruitcake" and "on dope" at the time. Thomas says that he simply ran out of money (which embarrassed his family) and that Ed just left the fledgling production company without even saying goodbye.

Though Eddie was proud of Crossroads and would speak of it often to friends and associates, this film would not see the light of day for nearly half a century. In 1996, the "completed" Crossroads of Laredo, assembled into its final form by Thomas, finally surfaced as a special feature on the DVD of a documentary about Ed. To the existing silent footage, Thomas added a credits sequence, an introduction featuring himself and Dolores Fuller, Ed's longtime girlfriend and occasional star, plus a new soundtrack with a few sound effects, narration by country singer Cliffie Stone (who died just two years later) and a few songs written by Fuller and sung by the eccentric Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., who claims to be the illegitimate child of Elvis Presley.

An effective image: Tex's death.

The viewing experience: Crossroads is very primitive and somewhat of a chore to watch, even at 23 minutes. One commentator, director-actor Ted Newsom, astutely observed that, while filmed in 1948, the production looks like it was made in 1918. Very often, Cliffie Stone's folksy voice-over is the only thing which gives the film any narrative cohesion at all. It feels like someone showing home movies of a family vacation and trying to explain the footage to people who weren't there.

Viewers will probably be most interested in the participation of two actors who would become regular members of Ed Wood's repertory company. The hero, Lem, is played by Duke Moore, who would turn up in five more Wood films, with very prominent roles in Plan 9 from Outer Space, Final Curtain, and Night of the Ghouls. Nagel would return in Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, and more. Unlike Moore, Nagel actually got acting jobs outside of Ed Wood's films, appearing on episodes of The Bob Newhart Show and The Rockford Files.

The basic plot revolves around a conflict between Moore and Nagel's characters. Nagel is Tex, a murderous thief who marries sweet Barbara (Ruth McCabe) and has a child with her but then ignores her and spends all his time boozing and womanizing at the saloon. Moore is Lem, the honest man who truly loves Barbara and despises Tex. Lem kills Tex in a gunfight, then must go into hiding. He boldly appears at Tex's funeral and is taken into custody. Just as he's about to be hanged, a witness corroborates Lem's story that Tex drew his gun first, and Lem and Barbara walk into the sunset together.

Clumsy as the film is, there are one or two effective shots. I liked, for instance, an image of the dying Tex on a makeshift stretcher fashioned from a wooden door, and there is a nice moment near the end when Barbara stands alone and is silhouetted against the western skyline.

While the musical soundtrack is well-intended and a sweet attempt by Fuller to pay tribute to Ed Wood, the electric guitars and synthesizers are all wrong for a 1948 production, as is the Las Vegas crooning style of Presley, Jr. These songs should have been performed in a traditional cowboy style with only acoustic guitar as accompaniment. It is perhaps significant that the character name "Barbara" would be reused in Wood's 1953 feature debut, Glen or Glenda?, and that part would be played by Dolores Fuller herself.

Undeterred by the failure of Crossroads of Laredo, Ed Wood returned to the stage until his next screen venture and the next stop on our tour...

THE STORY-AD FILMS (1949)

Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Not much is known about Ed Wood's advertising career, but Rudolph Grey's book does contain a September 18, 1949 article from a Poughkeepsie newspaper about it. The piece claims:

Edward D. Wood, Jr., former resident of Poughkeepsie, has just completed negotiations with Rene Lenoir of Switzerland, Robert Ganon, photographer of the Nazi war trials and Jack Ganon, sound technician, for the incorporation of 'Story-Ad Films,' in Hollywood, Calif. Mr. Wood, the quarter owner of the new firm, is the writer and director of all films produced by the establishment. He previously has done custom work for such national sponsors as the Dudley Steel Corp., The Aluminum Body Works, and the Crosley automobile manufacturers. 

Given Ed Wood's reputation as a notorious "bullshitter" (in the words of his own wife, Kathy), it's impossible to know how much of that story is true. But at least four commercials do exist from this era. You'll notice that they conspicuously avoid mentioning any actual brand names.

The viewing experience: These are a lot of fun -- eccentric, inventive, and naive in the best Wood tradition. Wood has made tremendous technical advances from the Crossroads of Laredo days, though the dialogue and acting are stilted in that strange way of seemingly all Ed's projects. True to the name of the company, these commercials tell miniature stories, and each has its own title. There are four little vignettes: Surprise (for used cars), Treasure and Curves (jewelry), The Bestest (footwear), and Magic Man (men's clothing).

The last is the most intriguing, as it features Wood himself in the role of a dapper magician, clearly having fun with the role. But there are amusing little details in all of them. Note that the bride-to-be in the first film is named Babs, a variation on Barbara. Treasure and Curves has a band of all-female pirates, led by the brash "Captain Kitty." And then there's The Bestest, yet another western with yet another Tex. In this one, though, instead of fighting over a girl, the two cowboys ditch the girl and go off to the shoe store together! By the way, I recognized some of the stock music in the background as having also been used by the great radio comedy team of Bob & Ray during their many soap opera parodies of the 1950s and 1960s.

The success or failure of Story-Ad Films is undocumented. I'm guessing it was a flop, since Ed's next big project would be a brief made-for-TV drama two years later....

THE SUN WAS SETTING (1951)

Alternate title: The Sun Also Sets

Availability: YouTube [link]

The backstory: Wood wrote and directed this 13-minute piece at KTTV Studios at the corner of Sunset and Van Ness in Los Angeles during the week of December 17, 1951. Ray Flin returned as cinematographer. The cast included Phyllis Coates, soon to portray Lois Lane on TV's The Adventures of Superman, in a supporting role. The lead was played by Angela Stevens, actress and sometimes model of the 1950s and early 1960s, who went on to play minor roles in two iconic films, From Here to Eternity and The Wild One (both 1953) and even appeared in one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts, He Cooked His Goose.

For serious Wood-oligsts, though, the most important cast member is ultra-bland Tom Keene, billed here as "Richard Powers," a former second-tier movie cowboy who had changed his name when his western career fizzled out. Wood, a fan of Tom's, would later have the actor revert to his old name and appear as the star of Crossroad Avenger and as a supporting player in Plan 9 from Outer Space. By the way, Ed Wood fans will instantly recognize the stock music which plays over the opening credits from its use in Glen or Glenda? That music has become so synonymous with Wood that Howard Shore even incorporated it into his marvelous score for Ed Wood (1994).

A much sexier Angela Stevens.

The viewing experience: This short film is claustrophobic and more than a little depressing, though it marks another step up in terms of technical proficiency. Angela Stevens plays June, a young woman who is confined to her New York apartment because of an "infection" and who has only a few months to live. She is visited first by her boyfriend, Paul (Keene), who is willing to marry her but is not willing to take her out clubbing or to Chinatown since that would kill her. They argue, and he leaves. Later, June is visited by her best friend, Rene, who wants to take June to dinner and a movie but, like Paul, refuses to take her out for a wild night on the town. Paul then returns and agrees to take June anywhere she wants, leading to the sad, ironic final twist. Coates and Keene are both quite flavorless and unmemorable here, but Stevens digs into the part of June with a certain ferocity.

The Sun is Setting is talky and slow-paced, sort of like the soap operas of that period, and the mood is very dispiriting and joyless. In short, this isn't much fun. June seems perfectly healthy, and the idea that this woman needs to be confined to her apartment at all times seems silly. The sets and costumes, to me, were completely inappropriate for the plot. Turn off the sound, and you'd never even know that June was sick. Those looking for quirky Wood-ian touches will want to take note of a couple of intense closeups of Angela Stevens which are rather awkwardly edited into the film and disrupt the continuity. Vintage photos reveal that Angela Stevens was quite the dish back in the 1950s, but she's given a frumpy hairdo and outfit here which spoil her appearance. Darn.

For the rest of his Hollywood career, Ed would be most closely associated with feature films. But he did make one more attempt at launching a television western...

CROSSROAD AVENGER (1953)

Ed Wood (center) poses with the cast of Crossroad Avenger.

Alternate titles: Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid; supposedly, this film and a second (now lost) TV pilot called Crossroad Avenger Returns were edited into a 50-minute feature called The Adventures of the Tucson Kid (1953). All that exists today, though, is this single 25-minute pilot.

Availability: Big Box of Wood (S'More Entertainment DVD boxed set, 2010) [buy it]

Nine-fingered Harvey B. Dunn

The backstory: Westerns were a huge TV fad in the early 1950s, and this was Ed's failed attempt to cash in on it. Ray Flin was back as Ed's cinematographer, this time working in color! Ed wouldn't get to direct a full-length color feature for over a decade. For his star, he brought in the old reliable Tom Keene, who had starred in about 50 low-budget westerns before his studio dropped him and he changed his name to "Richard Powers." He'd been "George Duryea" at the beginning of his screen career in the 1920s and would go back to "Richard Powers" after his days with Ed were through.

According to Nightmare of Ecstasy, Ed Wood maintained that this pilot "was passed up in favor of Wild Bill Hickok with Guy Madison." While this can't be confirmed (par for the course with Ed Wood), what is unmistakable is that Crossroad Avenger is a virtual Rosetta Stone for the rest of Ed Wood's 1950s films. Here, you will find many members of Ed's stock company: stalwart character actor Lyle Talbot; D-list western baddie Kenne Duncan; seedy, withered actor-stuntman Bud Osborne; rotund, jovial Harvey B. Dunn (who had one finger missing on his left hand), and the aforementioned Don Nagel. For the role of a deputy, Wood was able to recruit another one of his cowboy icons, Tom Tyler, who was nearing the end of a 30-year-plus career.

The viewing experience: Although Keene is altogether too vanilla to be the center of attention in a weekly TV series, Crossroad Avenger is a pleasant diversion. I'm not sure why Ed Wood thought this would make for a thrilling series, but Keene's character, the Tucson Kid, works for an insurance company and makes inquiries (with his gun) when a claim seems suspicious. Somehow The Lone Insurance Investigator doesn't quite have the right ring to it. In this installment, Keene rides into a town where a saloon has burned down under fishy circumstances. He almost immediately finds himself framed for murder by Lyle Talbot's character, who perpetrated the original insurance fraud.

Our hero just barely escapes hanging, which doesn't say much for the legal system of the time. Lots of people are gunned down in these 25 busy minutes, including Dunn as a friendly but loopy "desert rat" who might have made an interesting sidekick to Keene if this had been picked up, but eventually the Tucson Kid's job is done and he can ride off to the next assignment. Competently made but not outstanding, Crossroad Avenger has plenty of violence but very little of the trademark Ed Wood insanity. Completists and cowboy fans are urged to give it a watch, though.

And that does it for this survey of Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood. Join us here next week for coverage of Ed's first two features: Glen or Glenda? (1953) and Jail Bait (1954).