Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 196: The Ed Wood Experience Project (a modest proposal)

Some Ed Wood math. Are my calculations correct?

"Come out and play!"

A few years ago, I was watching Walter Hill's cult classic The Warriors (1979) when a strange thought occurred to me. As much as I enjoy this highly stylized film about urban decay and gang violence, with its memorable catchphrases ("Can you dig it?") and its outlandishly-costumed hoodlums, I was not watching it in the way it was intended. This film should not be enjoyed from the comfort of a couch in a nice, cozy living room. For maximum impact, you should see it in a sleazy New York grindhouse where you'd think twice about even going into the bathroom for fear of being mugged or worse. Ideally, this theater should also be one where you'd have to take the subway to get home, and your paranoia about that upcoming journey would be on your mind as you watched the film.

I've had similar thoughts while writing these articles about Edward D. Wood, Jr. Sure, I can watch Eddie's movies and read his many books and articles, and I can theorize about what was happening in Ed's life at the time he created them—for instance, how drunk or sober he was. But what do I really know about this man? After all, I was just three years old when he died. I don't drink. I've never been a Marine, a husband, an actor, a novelist, a pornographer, or a film director. 

What's more, I've lived my entire life in the Midwest: first Michigan, then Illinois. I've been to New York City a couple of times but never Eddie's hometown of Poughkeepsie. As for the city where Ed lived and worked for the last three decades of his life, I haven't visited Los Angeles since I went there with my parents on a family vacation many decades ago, and I saw the city mainly from the vantage point of an air-conditioned tour bus. (I did get to meet Cesar Romero, though. On Rodeo Drive, no less!) Cross-dressing has never appealed to me, not even for Halloween. All of my teeth are real, except for one in the front.

If I squint, I can just barely make out a few points of similarity between myself and Ed Wood. We're both Caucasian males born in America during the 20th century. I have written professionally and have dealt with editors, deadlines, and meager paychecks. I share Eddie's interest in classic Hollywood films, especially those of the Universal horror variety. Technically, by the standards of my county, I am living just below the poverty line. But I am frugal with what little money I have, so I've never experienced the bleak, paycheck-to-paycheck desperation that was Eddie's constant reality. Plus, Ed Wood had two expensive, bank-account-draining habits—alcoholism and filmmaking—that aren't a part of my life at all. So my existence is vastly different from Ed's. How could I understand this man without ever wearing an angora sweater or drinking rotgut whiskey?

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Eight by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg delves once again into those pesky paperbacks.

angora (noun)

(aŋ-ˈgȯr-ə)

1.  the hair of the Angora goat or Angora rabbit 

2.  yarn, fabric or a garment made from this hair. 

Ed Wood famously had an angora fetish. If there is something close to a fingerprint in Ed's writing, it's this soft, furry fabric. In fact, angora shows up ubiquitously in many of Ed's known adult paperbacks and is present in the vast majority of them.

Early last year, I began performing fishing expeditions into the world of adult paperbacks, predicated on the notion there are still unknown paperbacks written by Ed out there. One of the biggest challenges in this endeavor is finding the right stream in which to cast my net. I've never seen a total of how many adult paperbacks may have been written and published during the genre's heyday—roughly the early '60s through the early '80s—but it is conservatively in the many tens of thousands.

Late last summer, I was lucky to procure sponsorship for a few episodes of the The Ed Wood Summit Podcast from Triple X Books. While that relationship allowed me to get my hands on plenty of e-books, it unexpectedly resulted in a winnowing process. When I communicated with the proprietor of the site, he was curious about my endeavor to ID unknown works by Ed Wood. He graciously offered to search the entire text database of over 18,000 adult paperbacks offered on the site. Naturally, angora was one of the terms he searched for.

Not counting any of Ed Wood's known works—just a handful of Ed's verified titles are offered by Triple X—the result totaled a mere 118 paperbacks (roughly 0.65555555555556%) mentioning angora. I have been combing through that list, hoping to find one novel written by Ed. It's a daunting task, but I'm encouraged by a discovery I made prior to receiving the list: Raoul Woody's Sex Salvation. This novel validated my gut feeling that there's more Ed out there.

My findings thus far indicate that there were just a handful of writers who used the term angora with any commonality, albeit with nowhere near Ed Wood's frequency. Let's look at a few of them individually.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed-Tribution Odyssey, Part Four by Greg Dziawer

Down the field and past the goalpost! Make a score this time!