Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 87: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" (1975)

This week, Eddie takes us back into nudie movie history.

A coin-operated peep show.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. is, for better or worse, still known primarily as a filmmaker rather than a writer. Even though Eddie's books and articles represent a vast and colorful body of work, rich in themes and ripe for rediscovery, most documentaries about the man make only passing references to his writing career. A typical doc might show a couple of paperback covers from the 1960s before going back to talking about Ed's movies. Cue the umpteenth clip of model flying saucers dangling on the ends of strings.

If people haven't read Nightmare of Ecstasy or Muddled Mind, they may have no idea that Ed Wood was a writer at all, other than his screenplays. Part of the problem has been availability. Due to rights issues, only a few of Ed's dozens of novels (Killer in Drag, Devil Girls, Death of a Transvestite) are readily available on sites like Amazon today. The rest are expensive collectors' items. In recent years, the anthologies Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever have made nearly a hundred of Eddie's short stories easily accessible to his fans. But this represents merely a tiny fraction of Wood's written output

And Ed Wood's nonfiction remains even less known than his fiction, if that's possible. While Eddie's short stories and novels have been somewhat neglected over the years, his fact-based articles and books, nearly all of them sexual or sex-adjacent in nature, have been basically abandoned. Almost no one writes about this material, voluminous though it is. So, today, I thought I'd shed some light on one of Eddie's lesser-known nonfiction works from later in his career.

The story: "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" Originally published in Body & Soul, vol. 8, no. 1, May/June 1975. Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

A "camp" classic.

Synopsis: Though the porno film may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, it's actually part of a heritage that goes back to the earliest days of filmed entertainment. In the old days, there were arcades with hand-cranked machines that allowed the viewer to flip through photographs. Then there were primitive "peep shows" that displayed brief filmed striptease routines. Eventually these shows evolved, adding color and full nudity. Many of these shows focused on nudist camps, since that setting allowed filmmakers to present nudity in a non-sexual way. Eventually, the appeal of these nudist films wore off, and the coin-operated machines weren't profitable enough for film producers or arcade owners.

The next step was projecting these films onto a big screen for an audience, rather than showing them to one viewer at a time. Nudity started becoming commonplace in theatrically exhibited films made after World War II and shown at burlesque theaters. Some of these films had stories, but many were simply the same old strip shows of the past. Patrons back then would sit through live strippers and old newsreels before getting to see the films. Even though these films were cheaply made and shown in black-and-white, they initially attracted long lines of curious spectators.

But this, too, lost its novelty, and producers realized they would have to invest more money in these movies. Some of that money came from theater owners who depended on the producers to stay in business. By the mid-1960s, the movies featured some "petting and kissing" between boys and girls. And, at long last, color became standard. But the stories were still "weak." Ultimately, knowledgeable audiences simply demanded that the films include actual sex. And this practice continues now, despite the efforts of "pressure groups," who have only succeeded in making sex films into a thriving multi-million-dollar business.

Podcast Tuesday: "Wisconsin Fonzarelli and the Chest of Wonders"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler) is menaced by snakes on The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.

Timbuktu. It's one of those faraway places I've been hearing about since childhood, but I never really knew where it was or what happened there. Well, now, thanks to The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, I at least have some idea. Timbuktu is a city in the West African nation of Mali, and it became a center of both trade and learning in the 1100s. The city lost its influence over time, due to various wars and invasions, plus the shifting of trade routes. But Timbuktu still exists today, and its rich history is currently being cataloged and preserved. 

Isn't that interesting? There's only one thing that could make the city even more interesting, and that's if the cast of Happy Days somehow managed to materialize there in a flying time machine, accompanied by a "future chick" and a talking dog. And wouldn't you know it? That's exactly what happens in the November 1981 episode "All This and Timbuktu."

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about that episode and the effect it's had on our lives. We sincerely hope you'll join us for what should be a frank and eye-opening discussion.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 203: The saga of Ed Wood's historical marker

This house on Delano Street in Poughkeepsie was once Ed Wood's home.

And the year of Ed Wood continues! The 100th anniversary of Eddie's birth has brought with it many marvelous surprises, including some recognition from the director's home state of New York. On Wednesday, November 20, 2024, an official historical marker is being placed at 35 Delano Street in Poughkeepsie, New York to denote it as Ed Wood's childhood home. Amazingly, this blog played some small role in that achievement.

In June 2024, I received this intriguing email from a man named Robert McHugh:

I am a teacher near Poughkeepsie and for the past couple of years I have had my students apply for funding for historic markers for sites in Dutchess County. This year, one group of students decided to try for a marker about Ed Wood. They used some of the material from your site—the reference to the wedding announcement of his parents in the Kingston paper was especially helpful—as part of the grant application. 

Good news: they were successful and there is now a historic marker being made that will likely be installed sometime over the next few months. (It takes quite a while to fabricate them; I don't know if we will have it by October 10 for his birthday.) It's going to go in front of one of the homes he lived in, at 35 Delano St. 

I'm not sure if you happen to live anywhere near Poughkeepsie, but we would love to invite you to the unveiling, whenever that would be. 

Thanks for posting all that great information about him online.

I thanked Robert for the email and gave due credit to Greg Dziawer, who has written extensively about Ed Wood's early life in Poughkeepsie for this blog. Greg, in turn, has credited the formidable James Pontolillo for his tireless (and ongoing!) research into Ed's New York years. Unfortunately, since I live in the suburbs of Chicago and work full time, I had to tell Robert that attending the unveiling of the marker was not possible.

In October, Robert gave me an exciting update: "The Ed Wood marker has finally been made. Now we have to figure out how to install it and think about an unveiling ceremony." In assembling the ceremony, Robert reached out to director and film programmer Katie Cokinos, who organized the special screening of Ed Wood (1994) that I attended virtually on Ed's 100th birthday last month. Knowing I would be unable to be there in person, Katie very nicely asked me to write a speech for the occasion. Here is that speech:

Ladies and gentlemen:

We are gathered here on this wonderful occasion to honor the memory of a man who received very little recognition in his own lifetime. Edward Davis Wood, Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York on October 10, 1924 and became enamored of show business and the movies at a young age. He even worked as an usher at the Bardavon Theater on Market Street. I can imagine he spent many hours in that place, staring up at the screen and gazing in amazement at the larger-than-life figures projected there. He especially loved the cowboy stars, like Buck Jones, and of course the great horror icon Bela Lugosi.

For many of us, that's where the journey would end. We're content just to watch the screen and to live vicariously through other people's stories. We still do that today, except the screens have gotten much smaller and we can carry them in our pockets. But that wasn't enough for our Eddie. He didn't just want to watch other people's adventures. He wanted to have adventures of his own. That instinct led him, after a stint in the Marines during World War II, to Hollywood in the late 1940s.

 

Heed the words of Lyle Talbot.

Once on the West Coast, Ed Wood did everything he could to make his mark as a writer, director, and producer of motion pictures. And that's not all! He acted on both stage and screen, made TV commercials and pilots, and penned countless novels, short stories, and magazine articles. There seemed to be no end to his creativity or his ambition. Along the way, he attempted just about every kind of story there is: science-fiction, horror, Westerns, and even crime thrillers. He may never have gotten to work with Buck Jones, but he did work extensively with Bela Lugosi and even befriended the great horror icon. Bela wound up appearing in all three of Ed's most famous films: GLEN OR GLENDA, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, and the infamous PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

During his own, rather short time on this earth, Ed Wood received very little praise or recognition from the entertainment industry. He wasn't getting positive reviews in the press or awards from his colleagues. To the extent that Ed's films were noticed at all, they were mocked and derided for their low budgets, unlikely dialogue, and outrageous storylines. And yet, his quirky, memorable films have struck a nerve with fans for decades, and those fans have kept Eddie's memory alive long after his death in 1978. This year alone , the 100th anniversary of Ed Wood's birth, there have been at least three major new books about him, and his films continue to be shown in theaters across the country and re-released for home viewing as well.

And now, we place this marker at Ed Wood's childhood home. I am certain that Eddie would be flattered and thrilled by this honor. And if there is anything we can learn from his life, it's that we shouldn't be content to sit on the sidelines and watch other people do all the exciting things we wish we could do ourselves. As Lyle Talbot says in GLEN OR GLENDA, "We only have one life to live. We throw that one away, what is there left?"

I don't know if Katie will actually deliver that speech at the ceremony, but it was so nice to be asked. As for the marker, here is what it will look like. Perhaps, if you live near Poughkeepsie, you can stop by 35 Delano Street and see it for yourself someday.

This handsome blue and yellow marker stands as a tribute to Ed Wood.

Podcast Tuesday: "Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear"

John Hart and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.

"It was before my time" is one of my least-favorite excuses for being ignorant. When you think about it, virtually everything is before your time. Even if we limit ourselves to just human history, that's about 200,000 years. The average lifespan in America is only about 77 years -- a mere blip on the radar. That means we've missed 99.999% of what humans have done. Why do we insist on limiting ourselves to the 0.001% that happens right in front of us during our exceedingly brief lives? The past has been recorded in many, many ways. We owe ourselves to find out about it while we're here.

Sure, much of human history has gone unrecorded or has vanished with time, but here's the miracle of popular culture: the memorable, noteworthy stuff (movies, TV shows, pop songs) tends to be archived and preserved for future generations. Much of it gets rereleased and re-rereleased and re-re-rereleased over a span of decades, well beyond the lifespan of its original creators. In the past, we had to rely upon physical media -- books, records, tapes, etc. -- but in more recent decades, we've been busy uploading all this stuff to the internet for instantaneous streaming. The past is more accessible than ever. Take advantage of it.

I'm saying all this stuff because, this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're reviewing "Hi Yo Fonzie, Away!" In this episode from 1982, Fonzie (Henry Winkler) finally meets his idol, the Lone Ranger (John Hart). Forty years ago, this mattered. Two major pop culture characters were being brought together in the same space at the same time.

Today, despite the many hours of media he has generated (mainly radio shows and TV episodes), the Lone Ranger is in danger of disappearing from the public consciousness simply because he isn't "relevant" anymore. (God, I hate that idiotic and much-abused word.) If people today know him at all, it's from his disastrous 2013 movie. That film didn't do well at the box office, so we consigned the Lone Ranger to the junkheap of history. Who knows? Fonzie himself may join him someday.

Before all that happens, refresh your memory by listening to the latest episode of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. It's available right now. Just click that play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 89: "That's Show Biz" (1972)

These are the movies that saved Hollywood, according to Ed Wood.

Hot Flicks magazine from 1972.

During his troubled and abbreviated life, Edward D. Wood, Jr. did the best he could to document his own career as a writer and filmmaker. He was proud of the work he did in those fields and kept updating his resumes with his accomplishments. When Eddie died at the age of 54 in December 1978, he'd only recently been evicted from his final apartment and was unable to keep many of his mementos from 30 years in show business.

Fortunately, since then, Ed's loyal fans have undertaken the responsibility of documenting this man's unique and fascinating life. Some of those fans congregate regularly on a Facebook forum moderated by Bob Blackburn, who befriended Ed's widow Kathy and became co-heir to Ed Wood's estate. Joining this forum has given me access to material I never would have known about otherwise.

Recently, for instance, punk musician and longtime Ed Wood fan Howie Pyro shared an interesting article that Eddie wrote in the early 1970s. Let's take a closer look.

The story: "That's Show Biz," originally published in Hot Flicks, vol. 1, no. 1 (1972) from Gallery Press. According to Bob Blackburn, Ed's resume lists this story as being written in 1971.

Synopsis: The motion picture business has come a long way in just 70 years, and the early pioneers of the medium would be shocked by what's happening on the big screen today. The public lost interest in movies after World War II, and theaters started shutting down. Things got worse in the 1950s when television came of age. People could see big stars in their own homes for free, so they no longer felt the desire to go to movie theaters.

In the 1960s, film production costs kept rising, resulting in higher ticket prices at the theater. Kids could no longer afford to go to the movies. Then pressure groups started complaining about the amount of violence in motion pictures. Meanwhile, viewers with their own projectors began to show 8mm movies at home. Theaters would have to do something bold to survive, so they decided to defy the censors and exhibit movies with nudity and sex. It would generate controversy, but it was worth the risk. Eventually, movies contained full-frontal nudity and "hard-core sex acts."

Movie theaters are once again thriving, thanks to these sexy films. Will it last? Who knows? Naturally, children are not allowed to see these explicit new movies, but they'll eventually grow up and, with luck, become the next generation of ticket-buyers.

Wood trademarks: Hollywood history (cf. Hollywood Rat Race); history of sex in films (cf. "What Would We Have Done Without Them?"); mention of classic cowboy stars Tom Mix and Buck Jones (two of Eddie's real-life heroes); random use of italics (cf. "Filth is the Name for a Tramp," "Cease to Exist"); ellipses (Eddie's favorite... punctuation).

Excerpt: "Nudity hit the screen in all its glorious body exposing delights. Slight nudity had been seen from time to time in foreign films and those theatres which showed such things were about the only ones who were surviving during those disasterous [sic] years for Hollywood."

Reflections: Edward D. Wood, Jr. always loved movies and grew up wanting to be part of the film industry. I believe that, if he'd had his druthers, he'd have made old-fashioned Westerns with white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains. Either that, or Gothic horror films in the Universal tradition. The simple cowboy pictures and spooky Dracula derivatives that Ed preferred were already falling out of favor by the time he arrived in California in the late 1940s, however, so he made films that were more in sync with the public's tastes. For most of the '50s, this meant science-fiction (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster) and crime drama (Jail Bait, The Violent Years).

By the mid-1960s, however, Eddie's film career had bottomed out, and the only work he could get was in sexploitation and, eventually, outright pornography. That's where he'd stay for the rest of his life. While this would be a crushing blow to any ambitious artist, Ed Wood tried at least to put a positive spin on the situation. In "That's Show Biz," Ed semi-seriously argues that the nudie flick has saved Hollywood. "Perhaps this second breath for the movie business," he writes, "will be enough to cure the cancer which so nearly devoured it during the last twenty years." So there you have it. Porn cures cancer. Kind of makes you look at the industry with more respect.

Ed Wood wrote quite a bit of nonfiction over the years, much of it for publisher Bernie Bloom. Bernie would hire Ed to write short stories for his mags and stroke books, but he also used nonfiction articles like "That's Show Biz" to pad out his publications. A lot of these articles are what I'd call capsule histories or pocket histories of topics related to sex, movies, crime, the occult, etc. The college articles I reviewed a few weeks ago are good examples. Eddie rarely includes specific dates or facts in these articles, and he uses real names only sparingly. My supposition, then, is that he did these with zero research and instead relied on his own memories.

Did anyone even read these articles back in the 1970s? People just bought these magazines for the pictures, right? Well, Hot Flicks, vol, 1, no. 1 carries a cover price of $4. That's nearly $25 in today's money. This was not a cheap product. So the porn connoisseur might want to get his money's worth out of this issue by reading every bit of text it contained.

Since the latest fad is hiding pandas in pictures of things...

Even history's grimmest moments can be enlivened by the addition of a panda bear.

Here is a picture of the Nuremberg Trials with an adorable panda hidden in it somewhere. Can you find the cuddly rascal, hidden among the war criminals, guards, and jurors? Since the Internet is demanding pictures with hidden pandas, I thought I'd oblige before the fad had completely worn out its welcome. Is this what you wanted? Another hidden panda picture? Well, here you go. I hope you're satisfied. Happy new year, by the way.

Were any of your ancestors famous? KEEP READING TO FIND OUT!

History clearly favors grouchy men with facial hair, as shown by this photo collage.

Are there famous people in your family? Does your bloodline include kings, conquerors, explorers, or movie stars? Are you descended from an important historical figure? The surprising answer is below!