Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Plan 9 Cocktail Lounge Identified (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

Yes, we're delving into this topic again. I think this is the last time.

NOTE FROM THE BLOGGER: This is the second consecutive Ed Wood Wednesdays devoted to a mysterious cocktail lounge very briefly glimpsed in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). After musician Mike Hickey attempted to identify this elusive filming location last week, several other Wood fans quickly weighed in with various objections and doubts. One such fan, James Pontolillo, has offered his own alternative  conclusion as to the bar's location. That's the piece you're about to read. I very much hope that this settles the matter, once and for all. Thank you. J.B.

Slightly past the 17-minute mark into Ed Wood’s iconic 1957 film Plan 9 from Outer Space we see a montage of Angelenos reacting to flying saucers as they buzz Hollywood with seeming impunity (1). One of the startled citizens is a drunk man who has apparently just exited a cocktail lounge, whiskey bottle in hand. He can't believe what he's seeing and abandons his bottle, convinced that he must be hallucinating. It's a brief scene (~8 seconds split into two parts) that provides us with only a limited view of the lounge: a street number (4092), a portion of a neon "Cocktails" sign set into a framed opening in the building’s facade, a "No Minors Allowed" sign, and a windowless, light-colored facade that noticeably curves upward from the ground toward an angled awning overhead (2). I never thought about the identity of this cocktail lounge, but other Wood-fans have puzzled over it for some years now.

I have to thank Mike Hickey who resurrected the identity issue with his recent Facebook and YouTube posts suggesting that the Plan 9 cocktail lounge was a still-extant building at 4028 Santa Monica Boulevard (3). Since I love researching old buildings and properties, I immediately began digging into this location's history. Unfortunately, the results were not what I was expecting, and each new piece of information that I found undermined the idea that 4028 Santa Monica Boulevard was the Plan 9 filming location (see Blevins’ EWW #240 for details). 

Ed Wood Extra! Harry Medved revisits Plan 9 on Locationland (2025)

Tor Johnson emerges from his grave in Plan 9.

We may have celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ed Wood's birth in 2024, but the party is continuing well into 2025, folks. We all know film historian and critic Harry Medved as the co-author of The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), i..e. the book that brought posthumous fame to Ed Wood. Well, these days, Harry is working on a series of videos for PBS entitled Locationland in which he visits the Southern California filming locations of some of Hollywood's golden classics. 

Did you think he'd forget about Eddie? Fat chance!

In today's episode, premiering at 6:00 pm PST, Harry visits the filming locations for Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Harry's guests include comedian and writer Dana Gould, author Katharine Coldiron, and our very own Bob Blackburn, the co-heir of Kathy Wood's estate. You can watch the premiere of Plan 9 episode of Locationland right here. And you can watch a trailer for the episode right here. And if, by chance, you need a little more Medved in your life, Will Sloan recently interviewed Harry about The Golden Turkey Awards. You can find that right here.

Happy viewing/listening!