Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Poughkeepsie Odyssey, Part 7 by Greg Dziawer

Ed Wood returned to his hometown after the war with a play tucked under his arm.

Exactly who was Major J.C. Foxworthy, USMCR (Ret.) and how did he become partners in the movie business with fellow ex-Marine Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the late 1950s? In last week's article, Joe Blevins discussed the working relationship between Wood and Foxworthy, revealing a passel of previously unknown details about the latter. As there noted, the pair co-scripted an unrealized film to be titled Trial by Terror, and Foxworthy was credited as Executive Producer on Wood's supremely weird 1959 feature Night of the Ghouls. As to how the two gentlemen connected, Joe opined: "My guess is that Wood and Foxworthy bonded over their shared Marine past, with Eddie no doubt greatly embellishing his own, modest war record."

In fact, the two men's creative partnership stretched back well over a decade, when Eddie was still serving in the military and Foxworthy was only a Captain. An August 18, 1946 article in the Poughkeepsie Journal indicates that Foxworthy played the role of a Captain in Eddie's military-themed stage play Casual Company, described as a "farce in three acts." A surviving program from that time indicates that Foxworthy's character was called Captain J. Sleepingwell Gutter and that he and the other thespians were known collectively as The Sad Sacks. The program also indicates that Eddie co-wrote the play with one Harry J. Kone.

A Casual Company program with Foxworthy's name in the cast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 99: "Bride of the Monster: The One-Act Play" (2002)

Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi tread the boards in Bride of the Monster.

The movie that inspired a writing project.

I've been on the internet since before the internet was any good at all. In the mid-1990s, when I first started posting to Usenet newsgroups, there was no such thing as social media, and most of the platforms we use every day (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) were still years in the future. Even Google didn't start until 1998, leaving AltaVista as the search engine of choice. Back then, I had a dial-up modem, some rudimentary typing skills, and a lot of pop culture opinions.

If all this sounds achingly familiar, it's because I've written about this era of my life before when I posted my Glen or Glenda transcript from 1997 and my Orgy of the Dead script parody from 1998. Well, today, I'm going to share yet another vintage chunk of text from the olden days, though this one at least dates from the current millennium.

In the late 1990s, my online life revolved around a Mystery Science Theater 3000 newsgroup called rec.arts.tv-mst3k.misc. The show was still airing new episodes back then on the Sci-Fi Channel, and fans would regularly post reviews on RATMM. In August 1998, when MST3K premiered its version of the 1961 monster movie Gorgo as part of its ninth season, I decided to upload a short script called Gorgo: The One-Act Play to the newsgroup. This was basically a little comedy sketch featuring characters from the original film, Sam and Joe, discussing the possible consequences of bringing a Godzilla-like monster to London. (Sample dialogue: "Say, Joe, you don't think they're made at us, do ya?")

The response to Gorgo; The One-Act Play was fairly positive on RATMM, so I kept writing comedy sketches based on other episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Thus was born The MST3K One-Act Play Project. Another RATMM regular, Craig J. Clark, started writing his own MST3K-based plays just a few months after I started. Craig eventually put together a now-dormant website collecting both his plays and mine. It looks like the last entry in The MST3K One-Act Play Project was posted by Craig in June 2004. Remarkable longevity for such a gimmicky idea.

What follows is the text of my one-act play based on Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster. It was originally posted just over 18 years ago on March 7, 2002. I was more than a decade into my Wood fandom at that point, but Ed Wood Wednesdays wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon. At the time, I was in my mid-20s and working as a junior high Spanish teacher in Joliet, IL. I can remember writing these plays during my lunch break and then emailing them from my school computer to my home computer. Good times.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this artifact from the semi-distant past.

My idea for a can't-miss Halloween theatrical event

Neither Sissy Spacek nor William Katt are involved, unless they want to be.

Be part of the magic!

So I had this idea a few years ago for what I still think would be a really cool theatrical experience. I'd stop short of calling it a "play" because it's not quite that, though it would involve actors, props, costumes, a massive "set" (more on that later), and some ingenious practical effects. It's an immersive adaptation of Carrie, specifically based on the 1976 film version by Brian De Palma, and it's called Bates High Prom '76. De Palma renamed the high school in the story "Bates High" as one of the many, many, many Psycho homages he's made in his career. Anyway, Bates High '76 would not be staged in a traditional theater, but rather a gymnasium, VFW hall, or other large public space, possibly even a warehouse if need be.

The idea would be to recreate the prom from the movie as closely as possible. The venue would be decorated to look just like the gymnasium in the movie, complete with silvery stars hanging from the ceiling. We'd get real musicians to portray Vance or Towers, the band seen in the movie. They're the ones performing "Education Blues" in the background. I guess I'd also have them perform "I Never Dreamed Someone Like You Could Love Someone Like Me" and other tunes from the Carrie soundtrack. Mostly, they'd be playing mid-1970s Top 40 stuff all night. Ticket-buying attendees would be encouraged (not required) to wear either prom-appropriate clothing or 1970s-appropriate clothing. Both, if possible.

My actors would portray all the characters from the movie: Carrie White, Tommy Ross, Sue Snell, Billy Nolan, Miss Collins, and the ginger-haired super-villainess herself, Chris Hargensen. The prom would play out more or less in real time, and the actors would just be intermingled with all the other attendees -- not bothering people, you understand, just doing what they'd normally be doing under the circumstances. A lot of what they said and did would be scripted, but they'd have to improvise a lot, too. What would set the actors apart from the spectators is that the former would be miked and made up to look like the actors from the movie. How much of what a spectator hears during Bates High Prom '76 depends on his or her relative location and ability to notice details. If you attend the show, the story would be happening all around you: Carrie coming out of her shell, Miss Collins beaming from the sidelines, Chris and Billy rigging the election, etc.

And then... well, you know. You've all seen the movie by now, I hope, and you remember what goes down at the prom. Imagine living through it... or a safe simulation of it, at least. That's where practical effects, lighting, and sound come in. We'd have smoke machines, sprinklers going off, strobe lights, gallons of fake blood everywhere. It would be the most fun ever. Bates High Prom '76 is one of my many totally impractical ideas, and it probably wouldn't work in real life, but I'd like to give it a try sometime.  

UPDATE: My ever-reliable West Coast connection, Bob Blackburn, informs me that Carrie:The Musical is actually being staged in a manner similar to this in Los Angeles... to great reviews, no less! In a way, I feel justified. Maybe my ideas aren't as impractical as I'd thought. I'd love to see it. I think the only way to really do Carrie as a live show is to completely engulf the audience in the story and make them feel is if they are living it.

Here's a short radio play I wrote a few years ago. Wanna read it?

Here's some good advice for us... and for the characters in my dumb play.

The things you find sometimes, huh? I was searching through the files saved to this old computer and happened upon a script for a radio play I wrote a few years ago called A Spot of Tea. Please don't get the impression that this thing was ever, even once, performed on the radio. Oh, no. Never that. This was written for some Chicago-area creative writing contest. I have no remembrance now who exactly was running this contest, but they were asking for people to send in original short radio plays with a horror theme. I'd never written anything like that -- and didn't even know how to format the script for a radio play -- but I thought I'd give it a go. I wrote this up, printed it (on paper and everything!), mailed it in, and... heard nothing. No acknowledgement whatsoever. Maybe a year later, an online acquaintance of mine was trying to set up a website for short fiction and was looking for submissions, so I took this play and slightly reformatted it as a short story. I may post that, too. But for now, here is my one and only attempt at a radio play. At the time, I had probably just started drinking tea. I'm a regular addict now. It's also somewhat inspired by my real-life cousin, who actually did break into people's houses (and did considerable time in prison for his troubles). Do enjoy it, won't you?

I'm a produced playwright! Who knew?

"Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?"  - A classic scene from The Simpsons

So here's what happened.

A couple of nights ago, I started seeing that there were a lot of TV commercials for the upcoming DVD/BluRay release of Disney's Peter Pan. I thought this was as good a time as any to write an article about that film and about the Peter Pan myth in general -- something I may still do in the future. Anyway, I was pretty sure I'd already written a mini-review of that movie on a message board somewhere, and I went to Google to find it. I never did, but I accidentally found something even more interesting in the process.

Apparently, in 2011, a script I'd written back in the 1990s called The Rocky & Bullwinkle Horror Picture Show was actually performed on a real stage by real human beings as part of something called the KC Fringe Festival in Kansas City . As you might guess from the title, the script is a crossover parody in which that lovable cartoon moose and squirrel, along with other characters from their series (including Boris Badenov and Dudley Do-Right), act out The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The script was something of a viral hit back in the era before Google, Facebook, or YouTube even existed. And I guess, it's had a life of its own since then.

Here is the article which alerted me to the existence of this show.

And here are some photographs of the actual production, along with my guesses as to what's happening in them based on my own memory of the script.

Boris Badenov doing his version of "Sweet Transvestite."

The whole cast doing the opening number "Animated Cartoon Features."

Various cast members as Nell Fenwick, Boris Badenov, and Natasha Fatale.

Possibly the narrator conversing with Snidely Whiplash.

The whole cast performing a scene called "The Floor Wax Show."

This is all really trippy -- seeing people actually do stuff based on a script I wrote as a joke years ago. It's one thing to sit down at a computer and write that the show begins with a kazoo fanfare. It's quite another to learn that people really did play a kazoo fanfare at the beginning of the play.

What can I say? I'm baffled yet flattered. It's a funny old world sometimes.

The whole gallery of photos is here, if you're interested. 

 And did someone ask for a clip? No?  Well, here's one anyway.