Ed Wood's return to directing came in 1971 with the X-rated Necromania.
"We thought he was making a comedy, to tell you the bloody truth."
-Ric Lutze, an actor in Ed Wood's Necromania
Goodbye, Tor.
And now it is 1971.Whether he knows it or not, Edward Davis Wood, Jr. has only seven years to live. He and his wife, Kathy, have lost their little house on Bonner Street in North Hollywood and have moved into the seedy, violence-prone Mariposa Apartments at the intersection of Yucca and Cahuenga in LA. Before the year is out, Ed's longtime friend and long-ago star, Tor Johnson, will have died of heart failure at the age of 67. Nevermore will the ex-wrestler break one of Ed's insufficiently-reinforced toilet seats with his massive bulk.
Meanwhile, the world seems to be growing stranger and uglier by the day. President Nixon promises his 207 million constituents that he will end the nation's involvement in Vietnam. Public support for the war dwindles every day, especially when an American-supported SVA offensive in Cambodia fails after six miserable weeks.
On the homefront, the so-called "generation gap," a moral and aesthetic schism between the old and the young, has been turned into a sitcom, rechristened All in the Family, and given a spot on the CBS Saturday night lineup, right before Funny Face with Sandy Duncan. There are astronauts driving a buggy on the moon. The boxer once known as Cassius Clay has KO'd a draft-dodging rap. And down in Orlando, Walt Disney World finally opens five years after the death of its nameake.
On the radio, the ex-Beatles are either singing hymns to God ("My Sweet Lord") or questioning His very existence ("Imagine"). On movie screens, Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood are both playing rule-flouting, fascistic cops to critical and popular acclaim, either acting as the urban saviors for whom we've been praying or embodying all our worst fears about what happens when power goes unchecked. Elsewhere in cinema, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange asks us which is more disturbing: an amoral generation of lawless punks who steal, rape, and kill simply to relieve their boredom.. or a totalitarian government which will resort to truly perverse and unnatural measures to stop them?
Alden Ehrenreich looks typically blank as Han Solo because he has no character to play.
A typical screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Maybe Solo: A Star Wars Story never had a shot at being good, let alone necessary or impactful, it being yet another unsolicited prequel in a franchise already lousy with exposition. But I don't think it needed to be the pointless, empty, dispiriting slog that it turned out to be. Was I a fool for thinking this thing would actually be fun?
In the wake of the film's underwhelming debut—it "only" earned $84 million at the domestic box office over the Memorial Day weekend—plenty of theories are circulating as to why Solo failed to click with audiences. Franchise fatigue? Backlash from disgruntled fanboys (many of whom are weirdly fixated on their hatred of supporting character Rose Tico, who is not in Solo)? An overcrowded marketplace? All of the above?
I can't tell you with any certainty why certain viewers stayed away from Solo. That's for the industry analysts to decide. What I can tell you is that, for me, watching Solo was almost no fun at all and that I can't imagine this thing being anyone's favorite movie unless they'd only seen three movies and the other two were snuff films. And even then it would be close.
As it happened, I was in Indiana over the Memorial Day holiday, visiting my sister and her family. We all went to see the movie at the local multiplex, and I'll testify from first-hand experience that it played to soporific silence from the entire audience. I even had to fight the urge to nod off during the film's leaden middle passages and found myself wishing I'd brought a caffeinated beverage with me into the theater. The film's timid attempts at humor fell particularly flat. I think the socially-conscious droid L3-37 was supposed to be the film's designated comic relief character, the Jar Jar of Solo: A Star Wars Story. After one of her several failed wisecracks, I exhaled loudly enough with disappointment to make my niece giggle a little. That accounted for the one (1) audible laugh during the entire screening.
Curiously, speaking of Jar Jar, Solo: A Star Wars Story made me pine for the days of George Lucas' much-mocked prequel trilogy of the late '90s and early 2000s. As gratingly stupid as it is, The Phantom Menace at least provides some eye candy: cool-looking cities, cool-looking planets, cool-looking costumes, etc. Solo, on the other hand, is almost perversely drab, underlit, and murky. The title character spends the whole film bouncing from one inhospitable world to another, and we never get a good sense of the terrain in any of these places. It's like: mud world, another mud world, rock world, desert world. Gee, thanks a bunch, movie. A Star Wars movie should seem open and airy, bursting with possibilities. Solo, in sharp contrast, feels cramped and restrictive. There's not even a hint of adventure here.
Our antagonist: a petulant twerp.
I can't comment on the characters, since Solo didn't really have any. Instead, it had placeholders where interesting, well-developed characters would otherwise be. Wide-eyed, baby-faced Alden Ehrenreich bears little resemblance to Harrison Ford, other than being a bipedal mammal. I guess he says his lines all right—it helps that the script doesn't have him say, "Would that it were so simple."—but he's the least dynamic, compelling character in the movie, and that's a problem when the movie is named after him.
Does this movie even have an antagonist? I've heard Paul Bettany's character, stripey-faced gangster Dryden Vos, described as the film's main villain. But he's such a petulant little twerp it was difficult to take him seriously. In a real Star Wars movie, he'd be the lieutenant to the actual antagonist. I'm not sure how he got those scars on his face. I think he might just be a cat owner.
Everyone else? Eh, they're fine, I suppose. It's difficult to judge them properly because the script is so clunky. So many awful lines here. "She's part of the ship now." "You're the good guy." And that idiotic scene in which Han gets his last name. It's a complete ripoff of the scene from Mike Judge's Idiocracy (2006) in which Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) finds himself being renamed "Not Sure."
While we're talking about that part of the movie, let's discuss the Empire for just a moment. I've written before about how the Empire never makes the least attempt to win over the public's affections. Well, in this movie, there's actually an Empire recruiting film, and I'll be good and goddamned if it isn't seemingly inspired by a Family Guy parody. That's right: Lucasfilm is now taking cues from Fuzzy Door Productions.
A better template for this movie.
Solo even gets the little details wrong. It's a longstanding Star Wars tradition, for instance, to have weird looking bands and singers providing background music. In this movie, I think we get one lame lounge act consisting of a woman with a radio dial over her mouth (?) and a guy who's just a head in a jar. And they're off-key the whole time. Give me the Max Rebo Band or the Modal Nodes over these bozos any day!
Admittedly, I have never given a great deal of thought to what Han and Chewie were like before joining up with Luke and the Rebellion. But, if I'd had to guess, I probably would've said their lives were something like The Dukes of Hazzard. You know, "making their way the only way they know how. That's just a little bit more than the law will allow." Han and Chewie would be like Bo and Luke. The Millennium Falcon is their General Lee. And Jabba the Hutt (absent from Solo) is their Boss Hogg. I guess that makes Lando their version of, uh, Cooter or something. Look, it's not a one-to-one comparison.
But the way I see it, young Han Solo is a hotshot smuggler and pilot. He digs himself. He thinks he's too much. He has a badass ship. He has a badass sidekick. He has a badass blaster. And he's a handsome, athletic, quick-witted dude who is constantly outsmarting both the gangsters and the Empire. To him, every Stormtrooper might as well be Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane, i.e. a dope who couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. Han's life is a series of daring escapades and narrow escapes, and that's the way he likes it. In other words, it's a goddamned adventure. The movie starts out with this narration: "It is a lawless time." To which I would have added: "And Han wouldn't have it any other way."
Above all, I thought sure young Han would be a womanizer, a galactic Don Juan constantly seducing ladies (plus occasional aliens and droids) wherever he goes. But no. Solo: A Star Wars Movie gives him a steady girlfriend, Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), at the beginning of the movie, and Han remains stupidly loyal to her throughout the film. He's so earnest and wholesome, he might as well be a Boy Scout. I was certain there would be at least one scene in which Han is chased by a jealous husband, but Solo definitely isn't that kind of movie.
Instead, Solo wants to be basically a filmed FAQ about its title character. How did Han get his last name? How did he meet Chewbacca? How did he get his famous blaster? I would have structured it around a different question entirely: How did Han get his cynical attitude?
Another good role model for this film.
Let me elaborate. By the time we meet him in A New Hope, Han Solo is a selfish, sarcastic guy who keeps the world at arm's length. I think he does this as a defense mechanism. If he walls himself off emotionally, he can't truly get hurt. My version of his origin story would have explained how exactly he got that way.
Like I said before, my version of young Han Solo is a cocky, arrogant hotshot. But he's still a boy at heart. My script for Solo: A Star Wars Story, then,would be about Han's journey from boyhood into manhood. I would have kept the character of Qi'ra, as well as that of Han's quasi-mentor Beckett (Woody Harrelson), but their roles would have been different. Or, rather, their functions would have been different.
The first part of my Solo movie is about Han being a smuggler and having a grand old time at doing it. But then, he runs afoul of Beckett's gang somehow. Even this, though, seems like yet another lucky break for Han. Beckett has actually heard of Han, he says, and thinks that Han and Chewie would be good additions to the squad. Seeing as how the only alternative is having his head blown off, Han says yes.
Beckett's plan is to rip off some big time warlord, someone like Dryden Vos but not such a prep school punk. (And ixnay on those Garfield stripes on his face.) They have an operative on the inside: the warlord's beautiful mistress Qi'ra. Immediately, Han has the hots for Qi'ra, and soon she and Han are sneaking kisses whenever possible. It's possible that this is the first time Han Solo has ever actually been in love. Normally, he's the "find 'em, fuck 'em, forget 'em" type, but Qi'ra is different.
Beckett tells Han he has potential but that he has only been a small time operator up to now. And so, Han serves an apprenticeship under the more experienced crook, learning the ropes. In the end, the heist goes off successfully, and the warlord is killed, but it turns out Beckett has really only been using Han the whole time and plans to kill him and take his share of the money. Beckett tells Han, "It's a shame, too, kid. Because I was really beginning to like you. In fact..." Han shoots him at this point and casually kicks Beckett's body into a ravine, where it's eaten by animals. This is a key moment when Han starts to become more callous.
But the real moment of change for Han comes when he realizes that Qi'ra, too, was only in this for herself. She needed money to buy her way out of being a kept woman. Now she has it, and she doesn't need Han anymore. This has not been foreshadowed in any way throughout the movie, so the moment should feel like a real gut punch to the audience. We've come to know and like Qi'ra, and it's devastating to watch her dump Han. But she's not been a goody-goody either. She's more like a character out of film noir. I see Han as being analogous to the private eyes from those movies, e.g. Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. The film, then, would be about how Han lets some dame play him for a chump and how he learns a tough life lesson along the way. That's classic Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett-type stuff.
My movie ends with Han and Chewie in some shithole cantina halfway across the galaxy. Based on the way he's talking, we can see he's already started to develop the cynical persona of the Han we knew from the older movies. Suddenly, a strange emissary (Greedo?) walks up to Han and offers him a business card. It's from Jabba the Hutt. Han looks intrigued. Smash cut to end credits.
So, yeah, that's my take on Solo: A Star Wars Story. The TLDR version is this: Solo should have been Dukes of Hazzard in Outer Space. Just imagine this but with spaceships.
Officer Judy Hopps and Superman: which one is which?
Okay, hear me out on this.Over Easter weekend, while visiting with my family, I got to catch up on two recent movie blockbusters: Disney's Zootopia and Warner Bros' Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. For the record, I basically liked both of them. Zootopia is an extremely cute, attractively animated family film with a good message about tolerance and the dangers of stereotyping. It's a little preachy and on-the-nose for my taste, but it's still enjoyable. Dawn Of Justice is drawn-out and dour with too limited a color palate and too noisy a sound design, but the critics calling it an unmitigated disaster are exaggerating. I wasn't bored by it. It's perfectly fine. I'd never want to sit through it again, but it'll do. Both Zootopia and Dawn are worth your time. But what I noticed is that there are a lot of parallels between these two seemingly dissimilar films. Like what? Well...
Lemmon, Matthau, and Wilder: All together for the last time.
A poster for the film.
Call me morbid if you must, but today I decided to watch the final film directed by the legendary Billy Wilder (1906-2002). Its name is Buddy Buddy, and it's a farcical 1981 dark comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. To say the very least, the movie's reputation is not good. How not good? Roger Ebert started his one-and-a-half-star review thusly: "This movie is appalling." He ended his one-and-a-half-star review thusly: "Buddy Buddy is incompetent. And that is the saddest word I can think of to describe it." In between those two statements are 443 more words disparaging Buddy Buddy.
Even Wilder himself, the film's director and co-writer, disowned it, claiming the project was foisted on him by the studio, MGM. "This wasn't a picture I would have chosen." Though I've seen many of Wilder's classics (Sunset Blvd., Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment, and more), I'd never really even heard of Buddy Buddy until yesterday. That's when I accidentally stumbled on this 2012 quote from Quentin Tarantino:
“I’m really well versed on a lot of directors’ careers, you know, and when you look at those last five films when they were past it, when they were too old, and they’re really out of touch with the times, whether it be William Wyler andThe Liberation of L.B. Jonesor Billy Wilder with Fedora and then Buddy Buddyor whatever the hell. To me, it’s all about my filmography, and I want to go out with a terrific filmography."
So for Tarantino, Buddy Buddy was a cautionary tale, something to avoid. Even though Billy Wilder lived 20 more years after its release, he never directed another movie after this one. For whatever reason, that piqued my curiosity. What the hell could Buddy Buddy be about? I checked the cast list on IMDb and saw the names of Lemmon and Matthau. That made sense. They worked with Wilder on The Fortune Cookie, and Matthau even won an Oscar for that. The next highest billed person in the cast is Paula Prentiss, an actress about whom I have no opinion whatsoever. Easily the most intriguing person in the cast, however, is Polish-born madman Klaus Kinski. What in the blue hell was he doing in this movie? I decided to find out.
Buddy Buddy was never released on DVD, the only Lemmon/Matthau film not to receive that minimal honor, but the whole thing has been uploaded to YouTube, so I watched it that way. I can now report, in good conscience, that Buddy Buddy is honestly not that bad. It is far from essential, but it is also far from appalling or incompetent, especially if you don't judge it against Wilder's most famous films. Lower your expectations until they barely reach your ankles, and the movie is even kinda, sorta fun. Occasionally.
The setup is solid, and it should be. Buddy Buddy is based on a popular 1973 French comedy called A Pain in the Ass, which has been remade a total of four times already! I won't waste your time with details, but Matthau plays a contract killer who just wants to complete one more job and then retire to a tropical paradise. He's already killed two key witnesses from an upcoming mob trial, and there's just one more to go. The problem is, Matthau's only opportunity to kill the third witness will be to shoot him, sniper-style, from a hotel window across from a courthouse. So he checks into that hotel and waits for his one and only chance.
But the guy in the room next to him, a whiny, neurotic TV censor played by Jack Lemmon, is suicidal and hysterical as his second marriage falls apart, and Lemmon's antics are drawing a lot of unwanted attention to that particular floor of the hotel. Matthau has no choice but to pretend to be Lemmon's friend and become involved in sorting out his personal problems. Eventually, Lemmon's soon-to-be-ex-wife (Prentiss) and her current lover, a sex clinic quack (Kinski), are drawn into the chaos. Along the way, water pipes are broken (messily), a baby is born (cleanly), a laundry chute is utilized as an escape route, and Matthau has Thorazine injected into his ass at a most inconvenient time. It's that kind of picture.
Roger Ebert's review claims that the movie has absolutely no laughs, but I'll dispute his accounting practices. I counted at least two, maybe three laughs during my own viewing. For the most part, the movie is less a total disaster than it is a souffle that fails to rise. That's what we have here: a flat souffle. Despite the profanity and a smattering of sexual semi-candor, Buddy Buddy seems like a cheap made-for-TV movie or maybe a sitcom minus the laugh track. Wilder's direction neither helps nor hurts. He doesn't do anything to enhance the comedy, but he doesn't impede it either. Buddy Buddy doesn't blow any punchlines; it's just that the punchlines were never that good to begin with.
Wilder claimed the script was a rush job, written under pressure with I.A.L. Diamond. That I can believe. Diamond and Wilder wrote a string of memorable comedies together, including Some Like It Hot, but this feels like a shaky, sketchy -- though salvageable -- first draft. A lot of the supporting characters, like the clueless cops (including Ed Begley, Jr.) and nervous hotel employees, feel like placeholders, as if Diamond and Wilder were planning to flesh out those roles "a little later" but never got around to it. As it is, they stand around with nothing much to do.
By and large, the movie is drab and flat. A lot of that is due to the fact that the majority of Buddy Buddy takes place in Matthau's dumpy hotel room. The place is just ugly enough to be displeasing to the eye, but not quite ugly enough to be interesting. The whole movie, except for the ending, is very beige and blah from a visual standpoint. I'm very sorry to report that Lalo Schifrin's slightly cheesy score does not help, even though Schifrin has composed a lot of great music for other movies and TV shows.
A lot of Buddy Buddy feels like a mish-mash of different eras. The film takes place in 1981, but Matthau's character seems to have beamed in from the Eisenhower era, and the same goes for Dana Elcar's grousing police captain. I might have set the whole thing in the 1950s and shot it in black-and-white. It would have meant losing the hippie couple (don't ask), but trust me, that's no great loss. It would have also meant losing the "zany" sex clinic where Kinski works (ditto), but that's no great loss either. And losing the color would have been a massive improvement.
If there's a reason to see Buddy Buddy, other than as a historical curiosity, it's to watch Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau do what they do so well together. There's a reason why these two were cast as friends, enemies, and frenemies in films for decades. They're a perfect duo. Lemmon pleads and wheedles and dithers and pesters and overshares. Matthau grumbles and mumbles and seethes and cringes and lies. The movie is like a feature-length version of the irresistible force paradox, with Lemmon as the irresistible force and Matthau as the immovable object.
Would the movie have worked better with a more serious actor like Clint Eastwood in the role of the killer, as Billy Wilder later suggested? I don't know. Maybe. You can only judge the movie that was made, not the one that wasn't made. Personally, I was glad to see the Matthau-Lemmon chemistry was intact during the Reagan years. Maybe they weren't at their peak, but they weren't far off it either.
Fans of The Simpsons might get a kick out of this movie, since Lemmon plays a bumbling, accident-prone sad sack very much like that show's Gil Gunderson character. Jack is in full-on "Gil" mode here. The best way to approach Buddy Buddy, in the end, is to imagine what it would be like if Gil were roommates with Fat Tony. Doesn't that sound at least a little funny?
-subtitled dialogue from The Virgin Next Door (Part One)
Hindenburg over the Hudson: Early inspiration for Ed.
There's a common element in nearly every biography of a famous filmmaker of the 20th century, from Grade-Z schlockmeisters to Hollywood royalty: the story of getting that all-important first home movie camera. From those old, hand-wound 8mm jobs right up through VHS camcorders, the story is always pretty much the same. A kid would get ahold of one of those magical devices, and synapses would start firing in his brain. He'd get ideas. "That could be my movie playing at the local movie house," he'd think. And pretty soon, he'd start rounding up the neighborhood kids to start acting in his little pint-sized Westerns and war pictures, shot on location in the backyard.
In his 1998 book The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film, writer William Preston Robertson devotes several amusing pages to the early filmmaking experiments of Joel and Ethan Coen, two siblings who grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis in the late 1960s. Joel, the elder Coen, decided that he and his brother should mow lawns and use the proceeds to buy a Super 8mm home movie camera and film stock. Eventually, the plan succeeded, and the Coen boys did actually purchase a Vivitar camera and some film. The historic purchase did not immediately yield cinematic greatness, as Robertson details:
"Their earliest explorations were, to be sure, uninspired, if not disgracefully lazy. Setting the movie camera up in front of the television, they simply let it run -- filming, at least in part, a Raymond Burr jungle movie. It was an act of artistic lethargy that shamed even the boys, and they soon carted the Vivitar outdoors to see what might be worth filming there."
Eventually, the Coen boys did become more ambitious with their Super 8 extravaganzas, especially once they'd found a neighborhood star their own age, one Mark "Zeimers" Zimering (later an endocrinologist in East Orange, NJ), and crafted around him such homemade epics as Zeimers in Zambia and Ed... A Dog, their surreal update of 1943's Lassie Come Home. This era of the brothers' lives culminated in what Robertson deems their "pinnacle": a surrealist mini-epic entitled The Banana Film.
A Kodak ad from 1934.
Though he started nearly four decades previously and half a country away, Ed Wood's origin story was not too different from that of the Coens, minus the dogs and bananas. Edward Davis Wood, Jr.'s earliest films in his native Poughkeepsie were just as humble as what young Joel and Ethan were doing in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
In one of those fortune-shifting accidents of history, Ed Wood happened to be born during an era when affordable home movie cameras were first being made widely available to the general public. Though little Eddie did hold down several jobs in his hometown as a youth, the fateful movie camera that changed his life—ultimately for the worse, it sadly seems—was a gift from his postal worker father. In his 1994 Ed Wood-based musical, The Worst!, singer-songwriter Josh Alan Freeman attributes the cinematic gift to Ed's mother Lilian instead. The camera and young Eddie's obsession with it form the basis for a plaintive song called "Kodak City Special." Sample lyrics: "Look at me, Ma! I've got a camera! What in the world have you given your son? Let us pray!"
Several interviewees in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy speak with a certain amount of knowledge about Eddie's primordial work. A witness named Fred Robertson, seemingly a friend of Ed's father and quoted nowhere else in the book, makes this tantalizing statement:
"Years ago I had some of Ed Jr.'s films, 100 foot, 16mm, that he took himself. Scenes of him playing G-man with cap pistols, black and white, the typical thing that a kid would have taken -- a couple of guys playing cops and robbers, just clowning around, about four minutes."
Meanwhile, Kathy Wood, Ed's wife of twenty-plus years and perhaps the person who knew this unknowable man best, shared the following info with Grey:
"His dad bought him this movie camera ... and the Hindenburg was coming down the Hudson, on the course where it crashed in New Jersey and went up in flames ... and Eddie filmed it, he said it was thrilling, exciting, he was so proud that he shot it before it crashed. He was always so proud of that. [...] Ed would stage plays in his backyard, all the neighborhood kids would join in, he would stage them, write little stories and then film them. He was always filming things ... and that's all he wanted to do from the time he was four or five. He'd run around taking pictures. That's all he wanted to do."
Kathy's account gives you some insight into the life and mind of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Simply put, the boy was camera-crazy. He never got over that gift from his dad. It must have seemed like magic. But he was hardly unique in that respect. The "my first camera" story appears in many directors' biographies. I doubt, though, that such tales will crop up in the life stories of future filmmakers, who won't actually be using film in their endeavors. In the age of YouTube and the iPhone, the humble yet all-important camera has utterly lost its mystique. So, too, has the moving image. It's now a magic trick anyone with a smartphone can accomplish.
I'm dredging all this up because, this week, we are discussing perhaps Eddie's least prestigious work: the pornographic, hardcore loops he made in the early 1970s under the auspices of producer Noel Bloom. By this point in his life, Ed was making his extremely meager living from a typewriter, not a camera. His only steady, reliable source of income during those dark years was Noel's dad Bernie Bloom at Pendulum Publishing, for whom Ed wrote novels, short stories, non-fiction articles, all manner of pseudo sex manuals and tawdry textbooks. Kathy Wood was fine with this arrangement. Money's money, after all. But Eddie couldn't deny his first love, cinema, and was determined to stay in the motion picture game in any way he possibly could, no matter how lowly the assignment.
That's a constant theme throughout Eddie's thirty-year tenure in Los Angeles. When he couldn't get a feature film going, he'd do what he considered "the next best thing" or "the next best thing to the next best thing," be it commercials for Wesson Oil and Pyequick, unsuccessful Western and horror pilots, bone-dry industrial films for Autonetics Aviation, local TV programs like Criswell Presents and The Sam Yorty Show, and even sports shows—the latter despite Ed's seeming lack of interest in athletics. Anything that would keep him behind a camera. As Ed Wood worked his way down the Hollywood ladder, from horror and sci-fi to to nudie cuties to outright porn, the "next best thing" gigs he took between pictures also declined in prestige.
Which brings us to...
Swedish Erotica (circa 1973)
Linda McDowell greets John Holmes in this bleeped scene from "The Virgin Next Door."
An online directory of porn loops.
Alternate titles: None that I know of, but this is a tricky issue. These films are known collectively as Swedish Erotica, but the individual loops within the series are known by their own individual titles as well, like episodes of a sitcom. A thorough catalog of Swedish Erotica loops is available here. You might find these films posted online under their individual titles, such as "The Virgin Next Door" or "Behind the Ate Ball."
Availability: As of this writing, I am not aware of any official DVD, VHS, BluRay, or digital releases of Ed Wood's Swedish Erotica films. But several, including some of the ones I'm discussing in this article, have been posted to adult sites like Porn Hub, X Videos, and X Hamster. Additionally, there is an entire, now-dormant blog devoted to Swedish Erotica and additional SE content posted to a blog called Retro Loops. So the material is definitely out there. As for how to get it, take your pick. And if there are, in fact, commercial releases of Ed's Swedish Erotica films, please let me know about them. I'd love to be able to link to them.
The backstory: Okay, here is what we know for sure. Edward D. Wood, Jr. most certainly worked on short, silent, basically non-narrative pornographic films called "loops" for an undisclosed period in the early 1970s. But just which films he made, when he made them, and where to find them today is up for debate. We'll have to tread lightly this time, dear readers. Here is what Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., still the closest thing we have to a definitive biography, has to say about the topic:
"Wood made an unspecified number of hardcore, 12-minute films in the 1970s for Swedish Erotica. Inasmuch as these films are uncredited, Wood's output in this area is unlikely to be documented. Some of the films he may have directed: Massage Parlour; Girl Friday; The Jailer."
Not terribly promising, I know, especially the "unspecified," "uncredited" and "unlikely to be documented" parts. That's a lot of "un"s in one place. But hold on, readers! Another Wood historian, Philip R. Frey, is on the case, and he has a page from his Hunt for Ed Wood site devoted to the Swedish Erotica films, too. There, he lists 19 titles that Ed Wood "apparently wrote and directed" for the long-running series. Frey's list corresponds to a catalog of Swedish Erotica films at a surprisingly clinical Dutch website called the Adult Loop Database (hereafter, ALDb). These 19 films would be the first of over 500 made under the Swedish Erotica banner from 1973 to 1984, meaning that a venerable porn institution began with Ed Wood himself at the helm.
The ALDb lists no Swedish Erotica films with the titles Rudolph Grey describes. Frey speculates that these films might belong to another series of pornographic loops called Cinema Classics, on which Ed also toiled in the early 1970s. I searched through the database of loops and found no titles, under any series, called The Jailer, and while there were several loops set in massage parlors, I couldn't find any actually called Massage Parlour (or Massage Parlor, for that matter). Meanwhile, Girl Friday is the name of a genuine loop from 1970, but it was made in London, England by the Mayfair Film Society and has no connection whatsoever to Ed Wood.
John Holmes in "Big John Part I."
Here, then, is a list of the first nineteen Swedish Erotica films, the ones supposedly directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr. The ones marked with asterisks are linked to online streaming videos you can watch for free. The others link to vintage advertisements from a mail-order catalog. The hyperbolic, panting plot descriptions below come directly from those advertisements as well. Along with some purple prose, these advertising blurbs give you some idea as to the content of the loops. The casting information comes from the ALDb.
The Virgin Next Door (Part One)* - Starring John Holmes and Linda McDowell. "Howie has a thing going for him. He's bored a hole in the wall so he can see into the next apartment ... the apartment of a luscious, vivacious broad ... he likes to watch her undress and jerk off at the same time ... but then he becomes brave enough to visit her ... finds she is a virgin, but willing to try sex with him ... and here he teaches her all he knows with his vast resources of experience ... she takes everything to her head."
The Virgin Next Door (Part Two) - Starring John Holmes and Linda McDowell. "The girl, Jinny, has much to learn, and through her virgin attributes Howie is right there to eat her pussy, get her completely turned on, and to show her what else to expect from the sexual world.... She finally learns many of the techniques and devises a few of her own ... and the entire blow off of this twenty-two minute film is the cum scene whereby she uses the cum to wash her own body."
School Girl - Cast unknown. "While at the school library, Janice picks up her book and on the way out she meets one of her classmates. After they sit in the park, they decide to go to her apartment to do her homework. She learns more about sexology than she could ever learn at school. See these school kids in all their perverted ways in this film."
Western Lust* - Cast unknown. "Duke, watching this voluptuous redhead from the underbrush sneaks up on her and pulls out his weapon and forces her to his shack. At the shack, perversion and lust take over. Put this reel on your projector and see it all."
Love-Mates - Cast unknown. "A beautiful woman desires sweetness and tenderness in her lovemaking but lust and passion take over. Look on as she is discovered in her bath and her encounter with her love-mate. This is a film you will want to see over and over again."
Wet & Wild - Cast unknown. "Picture Joyce and yourself meeting and going back to her apartment together. Once there, you boy enjoy the lust and savagery that sex can offer. This is an overwhelming and exciting film you will never forget."
Park Lovers- Starring John Holmes. "While at the zoo, Debby meets more than she can handle. After looking at the animals her new acquaintance takes her to his apartment where animal lust swings all the way. Unknown to her, he likes it one way; and that is bottoms up."
Girl on a Bike*- Cast unknown. "Tina Loves riding her bike after class. Meeting new people is her thing, so hop on while she shows you what love and sex is all about. Leaving nothing to the imagination, this spicy film is a must for your collection."
Lusty Neighbor- Starring Cyndee Summers. "Bill, driven by forces he could not resist, goes over to his neighbor's house for a drink. Tantalized by the idea of her in the shower, he cannot control his desires. When Audrey comes down and he sees her beautiful body, it excites him to the point of no return."
Hollywood Starlet- Starring John Holmes. A sequel to Park Lovers. "After their meeting at the zoo last week, Debbie is anxious for another date, this time at her home and on her terms, which is to be stripped and made love to slowly and with tender loving care. One of the great action films of all time."
"Two Hot to Handle"
Morning Walk- Starring Luther Worth. "After giving her dog a good brushing, Ginger takes it for a morning walk. While out, she meets Mike and Sharon, who are out for a drive and invites them to her house for a visit. Once in the house, all Mike and Sharon have on their mind is to take advantage of Ginger anyway they can. This is a fantastic film and a must to the connoisseur."
Big John Part I- Starring John Holmes and Barbara Barton. "This is a top-notch movie where a poolman interrupts a beautiful starlet while she is taking her morning swim. The footage on this film will hold you captive until the very last frame. If you liked Part I, you'll love Part II.
Big John Part II- Starring John Holmes and Barbara Barton. "Part II picks up where part one leaves off. While still swimming in the morning sun, flesh and fury erupt. Look in while John and Bridget leave nothing to the imagination in this exotic film. Bright and clear close-ups make this film a winner."
Devil Cult- Cast unknown. "Devil cultist Peolzig captures this young virgin and while she is at the altar, her flesh is taken with lust. She was given a potion which sends her into the depths of passion where there are no bounds to the imagination. This film is a must to add to your collection."
Behind the Ate Ball Part I* - Starring John Holmes and Barbara Barton. "Roger brings his naive girlfriend to his house to play a game of pool, but pool isn't the game he really has on his mind. The action is so hot and torrid, you'll need to fan your screen. This film is a must for those who love indoor sports."
Behind the Ate Ball Part II- Starring John Holmes and Barbara Barton. "After the game of pool, there is no place to go but into the room of mirrors where all acts are viewed from all angles. Watch her tease his big cue, and rake her fingers over his body. See this young girl ravished, and ohhhh, how she loves it."
15" Commercial- Starring John Holmes and Cyndee Summers. "When Vicky & Tom turn on the TV, they find it is out of order. So Tom decides to turn on Vicky with his 15-inch commercial. Watch these two people as they satisfy their innermost needs. Watch as she goes wild after she sucks down on every incredible inch he gives her."
Wives at Play- Cast unknown. "Bright sun and blue water make for an outstanding background for this most unusual sensuous film. Lovemaking between three outstanding females makes for the most stimulating and exciting film ever. Unbelievably sharp close-ups that will make this film your favorite."
Two Hot to Handle- Starring Luther Worth. "Two young roommates out for a ride are spotted by a rugged well-hung guy who follows them home. While looking through the bathroom window, he sees the girls making it with each other in the tub. When they finally spot him, they invite him in for an evening of exciting lovemaking. This is an unusual film guaranteed to give you pleasure."
Hot and bothered yet? As you may have guessed from those descriptions up there, with their numerous references to collecting, the Swedish Erotica films were not intended for theatrical exhibition. Rather, they were aimed at erotic hobbyists with their own projectors and movie screens. You were supposed to order these films out of a catalog, have them discreetly shipped to you (in plain brown wrappers, one wonders?), and then play them in the privacy of your own home. In a way, that makes them predecessors of the infinitely more convenient VHS tapes of the 1980s. Affordable VCRs helped to usher in the so-called "home video era." The ability to rent rather than purchase videotapes was a major favor in their popularity, but this was not possible with the Swedish Erotica loops. These you had to buy.
Obviously, the major advantage of the Swedish Erotica loops was the privacy they afforded viewers. If you screened these stag films at home, you didn't have to risk being recognized or maybe even arrested for viewing them in a public place.
The disadvantages? Well, price for one. A single Swedish Erotica reel would have cost you $50 in 1978. That's over $180 in today's money—quite an investment. Though music has been added to the current digital versions, the original reels were totally silent, meaning that you couldn't hear the actresses' moans of ecstasy. Any expository dialogue would have to be conveyed via clumsily added subtitles. Later Swedish Erotica films did include sound, but not the original loops made under the direction of Ed Wood.
Also, projecting 8mm or 16mm movie reels in your own home could be a labor-intensive, frustrating process for the wannabe thrill-seeker. In order to enjoy these forbidden little films, you'd have to know how to thread and focus a film projector and pray like hell that your very expensive $50 loop didn't unravel, break, or, worse yet, melt against a white-hot projector bulb. But the series obviously had some staying power. According to the ALDb, Swedish Erotica lasted from 1973 to 1978, with additional titles produced—seemingly by a different group of people—in 1984.
I Am Curious (Yellow)
As near as I can tell, there is nothing particularly Swedish about the Swedish Erotica movies either. The ALDb identifies the series as US-made. The actors are manifestly American, including porn legend John Holmes, and the loops appear to have been filmed in familiar old Los Angeles. That's a good 5,327 miles away from the native land of IKEA, meatballs, and Tor Johnson.
To understand the meaning of the series' title, we have to venture back almost half a century to a time when American cinema was much more prudish than it is now and when American moviegoers were champing at the bit for some dirty thrills wherever they could find them. In the 1950s and especially the 1960s and 1970s, European art films were more frank in their depiction of human sexuality than contemporary American films, and word of this definitely reached the States. People would eagerly attend European movies and sit through the "boring parts" in the hopes of seeing a little skin. Schlock American filmmakers even talked of adding extra nudity to their own movies for the "European versions."
Swedish cinema gained a particularly strong reputation for scandal in 1969 because of Vilgot Sloman's infamous I Am Curious (Yellow), which was decidedly more sexually adventurous than mainstream American films of the era. Yankee audiences flocked to the somber art film to see its much-ballyhooed full-frontal nudity and simulated sex scenes. The film's financial triumph—a true succès de scandal—brought on the expected legal woes, but the American distributors of I Am Curious (Yellow) managed to beat the rap in court by maintaining that the film had artistic value beyond mere titillation.
Roger Ebert, for one, was unimpressed, giving the film a one-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times in September 1969 and warning his readers that Yellow was "a real dog." As for the film's censorship problems, he was unsympathetic:
"Perhaps the legal defense should have given us warning. The usual parade of literary and movie critics stood up in court and testified (A) that the movie had redeeming social merit, and (B) that, speaking as a healthy adult—honest, judge—it didn't do a thing for me. That's easy to believe. I Am Curious (Yellow) is not merely not erotic. It is anti-erotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds."
Mr. Ebert's misgivings aside, Curious was a box office smash and made a lasting impression in the minds of lustful moviegoers. From that point on, Sweden was synonymous with sex. And did the sleaze merchants in America take notice? You bet they did! Throughout the 1970s, the word "Swedish" was opportunistically slapped on any number of softcore and hardcore erotic films: some made domestically, others imported. I again refer you to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), in which the title character ill-advisedly takes his mortified date to see Swedish Marriage Manual (1969). And the hits kept coming: Sweden: Heaven & Hell, Love Swedish Style, Maid in Sweden, Anita: Swedish Nymphet, and more.
Reverberations of the "Swedish invasion" of the 1970s could be felt for years in pop culture. In 1991, for instance, advertisements for Old Milwaukee beer featured a group of scantily-clad, vaguely Scandinavian-looking women dubbed the Swedish Bikini Team. As late as 1993, Homer Simpson could make his wife, Marge, hysterical with grief by telling her he was going on a tour of Sweden with his barbershop quartet. Although the phenomenon may be unknown to younger Americans, "Swedes-ploitation" was a crucial part of 20th century Americana. Swedish Erotica was just one part of a much larger trend.
Speaking of larger trends,Swedish Erotica was hardly the beginning and end of Eddie's career in pornographic loops. In fact, he was incredibly, almost heroically prolific in this field. According to Bob Blackburn, co-heir of Kathy Wood's estate, Ed's personally-curated resume lists a staggering 716 movies made between 1971 and 1973 alone! These amount to 16 full pages of double columned titles. And all of this while he was turning out stories, articles, and novels by the dozens. Surprisingly, though, Bob could not find the Swedish Erotica films listed among these voluminous credits. Below, please enjoy a mini-gallery of related images Bob has allowed me to share with you on my blog. Among these are:
A page of Ed's directing resume with some of his short films listed, such as Dick Claims To Be A Stud, Transplanted Lesbian, Clean It Up Good, and Bruce Of Muscle Beach. That last title seems to indicate that Eddie may have made some gay-themed loops, too.
A brief excerpt from a Wood-penned article about the pornographic film industry called "That's Show Biz. Note the sly double meaning of "show." (A similar pun is made in Nympho Cycler. "I'm about to show my business.")
A couple of pages of advertisements for loops from a 1975 issue of Ace. Bob tells me this magazine had an article by Ed entitled "A Tax on Sex."
A typical Swedish Erotica title screen.
The viewing experience: Not nearly as depressing or off-putting as I was expecting. Especially compared to the sometimes troubling skin flicks Ed made with Steve Apostolof and Joe Robertson, not to mention Ed's own, somewhat unappetizing attempts at directing X-rated features, the Swedish Erotica loops are lighthearted, largely cheerful in tone, and even fairly fun to watch. The always-generous Philip R. Frey, who previously supplied my copies of The Lawless Rider and Mrs. Stone's Thing, sent me a DVD containing several of the existent Wood loops: The Virgin Next Door (both parts), School Girl, Love Mates, Park Lovers, Morning Walk, Behind the Ate Ball Part I, and 15" Commercial. So I can say I've seen about half of Ed's purported work for Swedish Erotica. I'd still like to see Devil Cult, though, as it sounds a lot like Eddie's short stories, "Hellfire" and "I, Warlock." (Both are anthologized in Blood Splatters Quickly.)
In films of this length—generally about seven or eight minutes—there is not much time for exposition or character development. And, true to form, Ed gets right down to business here. After all, the customer just spent half an hour setting up his 8mm projector and home movie screen, both of which he probably had to drag out of the hall closet. He doesn't want to wade through a lot of preliminaries. The formula for a Swedish Erotica loop is simple: boy meets girl(s), boy has sex with girl(s), boy achieves orgasm, the end. That's about it. The indoor scenes are brightly-lit, and the exteriors are shot in broad daylight. I wonder if this was done because of the limits of home movie projectors. The ads for Swedish Erotica make a big deal of their films being sharply focused and including lots of close-ups. That's to be expected when the viewer, projectionist, and exhibitor are one and the same.
Unlike Ed's feature-length adult movies, which tend to offset the eroticism with disturbing anti-sexual content, there is no undercurrent of darkness in the Swedish Erotica loops I screened for this article. The sex is (generally) depicted as consensual and mutually enjoyable for the men and women. Traumatic rape scenes are not in evidence here. A couple of the actresses have to be coaxed -- gently, by the standards of adult films of the era -- into having potentially-painful anal sex with the famously-endowed John Holmes, but there is no violence or brutality here, as there might be in a Joe Robertson or Steve Apostolof film. Ed Wood's own predilection for necrophilia, an erotic fixation on death and the dead, is also mercifully absent in the Swedish Erotica loops.
But that is not to say that these films completely lack any of Ed Wood's trademark kinks and fetishes. Several of the actresses wear the lacy, frilly nightgowns and black stockings Ed so adored and coveted, and there are plenty of fuzzy pillows, blankets, and rugs nearby, too, which correspond neatly to Ed's lifelong love of angora and other soft materials. In one episode, furthermore, Ed Wood even includes some scratchy-looking footage of a NASA rocket taking off as a visual metaphor for an orgasm, so his penchant for stock footage was not limited to his science-fiction and horror films.
A familiar owl painting in Swedish Erotica.
For Ed Wood superfans, however, the most amazing detail to be found in any of the Swedish Erotica loops occurs right in the very first one: The Virgin Next Door (Part One). Before John Holmes pays a visit to neighbor Linda McDowell, he first spies on her through a hole drilled in the wall and masturbates while watching her undress. (Ed Wood does some crude, not-entirely-coherent intercutting to indicate that Holmes is fantasizing about the woman.) On Holmes' side of the wall, the hole is covered by a painting of a bull -- a properly macho symbol for this well-hung ubermensch. But on McDowell's side, there is a very familiar-looking painting of two owls, and the peeper can look through the eyes of one of the owls into the woman's bedroom. This is a device imported directly from Wood's previous feature film, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love. From what I can see, it's the exact same prop, merely being recycled!
This is crucial to me, because it indicates that Ed Wood really did direct The Virgin Next Door and, in so doing, worked with one of the most famous male porn stars of all time, John Holmes. In case you had any doubts, Holmes' famous appendage—as impressive for its Coke-can girth as for its length—is showcased frequently in the Swedish Erotica shorts. The phallus is clearly a star, and the director lavishes upon it the kind of admiring close-ups once afforded to Greta Garbo.
As for the man to whom it is attached, Holmes appears very young and naive in these films. He was in his late twenties at the time and had only really been making X-rated films for a couple of years by then, though he'd already played his signature role, lascivious detective Johnny Wadd, at least twice. He is tall, thin, and almost goony-bird gawky. While some have said he looked like Leave It To Beaver's Ken Osmond, leading to a silly urban legend that Holmes actually played Eddie Haskell, the actor reminds me more of an undernourished Donald Sutherland, circa Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Animal House.
If nothing else, the Swedish Erotica films have a kind of time-machine quality to them, since the decor, clothing, and hairstyles of the early 1970s—trendy then, tacky now—are all on abundant display here, along with all the exposed flesh. Here, you will see towering bouffant hairdos, shag carpeting, avocado-colored furniture, wide collars, and unsavory-looking porn mustaches. This will sound counterintuitive to many of you, but I detect some innocence and naivete when I watch the Swedish Erotica loops. They seem to be relics of a less savvy time in our nation's history when, in order to even watch ten minutes of uninterrupted porn at home, you had to send in fifty bucks and wait six to eight weeks for delivery!
Thanks as always to Phillip R. Frey and Bob Blackburn for their invaluable help in assembling this article.
"Before you went insane": Parker Posey in Waiting For Guffman.
Bruno Kirby in a deleted scene from Spinal Tap.
Deleted scenes are like those little toys you get for the cost of pocket change from vending machines at grocery stores. You know, the ones that come in little plastic bubbles. They're a dicey proposition at best. You can't choose what you get, after all. You just put your coins in the slot, turn the little handle, wait for your toy to tumble out of the chute, and hope for the best. So you can't expect much from them. The same goes for deleted scenes from movies. Most likely, they'll be worthless. But sometimes they're the best damned thing ever.
Let me give you a case in point. If all you've ever seen of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is the theatrical cut, well, you've still seen perhaps the greatest comedy of all time. So congratulations on doing that. But Spinal Tap aficionados know that much more was filmed for that project than could ever fit into a single, 85-minute movie.
Famously, the actors in This Is Spinal Tap, many from the world of improvisational comedy,were working not from a script but rather from an outline and thus had a free hand in ad libbing scenes and dialogue along the way. Director Rob Reiner just kept his cameras rolling the whole time. His original work print was four and a half hours long, and that was without the one-on-one interviews that were interspersed throughout the final version.
To get Spinal Tap down to a manageable length, a fearsome amount of material -- much of it great -- landed on the cutting room floor. Whole subplots were axed. Characters vanished. Pivotal, revealing moments vaporized. Today, who knows? Reiner might've pulled a Tarantino and spread this shit out over multiple movies, a la Kill Bill.
As it happened, the excised moments from Tap have trickled out over the years via laserdisc, DVD, and BluRay releases of the film. Much of this material is well worth watching, and some of it is as good as or better than what wound up in the actual movie. I have a particular fondness for a scene in which Bruno Kirby's Sinatra-obsessed limo driver, having tried marijuana for the first time, strips down to his skivvies and sings "All the Way" before passing out in full view of the heavy metal musicians he's been driving around.
When Spinal Tap veteran Christopher Guest started making his own mockumentary-style comedies in the '90s, he retained the template from the previous film, i.e. shooting from an outline and letting his actors improvise. In the funny and poignant Waiting for Guffman, Guest's actors, again including a number of improv veterans, worked from an outline rather than a script. Like Rob Reiner before him, Chris Guest shot much more than he could ever include in one movie. So he crammed the really essential stuff into an hour and twenty-four minutes, nearly the same length as This Is Spinal Tap, and relegated the best of the rest to the "Deleted Scenes" section on the Guffman DVD. And there, my friends, is where you will find my candidate for the single greatest deleted scene of all time.
In Waiting For Guffman, Parker Posey plays Libby Mae Brown, an extremely laconic, dead-eyed, twentysomething Dairy Queen employee stuck in the bland Midwestern purgatory that is Blaine, Missouri. Libby's only true escape from ice cream-related drudgery is her active involvement in Blaine's community theater program, which has thrived in its own odd way under the leadership of flamboyant, closeted Broadway expatriate Corky St. Clair (played by Guest).
On the stage, though somewhat stiff and self-conscious as an actress, Libby becomes much more outgoing and demonstrative than she is anywhere else in her life. As silly as Corky's plays may seem, they mean a lot to Libby and the other people involved in them.
The plot of Guffman concerns the production of Red, White, and Blaine, a pride-boosting original musical written by Corky to commemorate Blaine's 150th anniversary. Libby Mae is one of the aspiring thespians who wish to be in the show, and the famous deleted scene is the monologue she performs as her audition. She performs it in front of Corky St. Clair along with humorless music teacher Lloyd Miller (Bob Balaban) and a third, unidentified man whose purpose at the event is not immediately clear.
In the finished movie, Libby's audition consists of singing a flirtatious 1958 Doris Day song called "Teacher's Pet." ("Teacher's pet/I wanna be teacher's pet/I wanna be huddled and cuddled/As close to you as I can get.") The reaction of the judges is the same as to her monologue: Corky is utterly enchanted, Lloyd quietly disgusted, and the third man indifferent.
Left on the cutting room floor, though, was Libby's brilliant, obviously Flowers in the Attic-inspired audition monologue, which might have taken Guffman in a darker, weirder direction than the director wanted to go, with its tasteless insinuations of incest, rape, and euthanasia. According to Christopher Guest, Parker Posey wrote this deranged soliloquy herself. It certainly gives the viewer new insight into the character of Libby Mae Brown, who in the rest of the film seems almost catatonic and whose speech frequently contains long, uncomfortable pauses as she chews her gum and slowly collects her thoughts.
Part of the joy of the audition monologue is the opportunity to see both sides of Libby's personality: the ostentatious actress and the insecure, self-defeating young woman. Before delivering her monologue, Libby gives the panel of judges much more information than they need, and during the performance, she breaks character to give yet more unnecessary exposition.
Happily, though it didn't wind up in the final cut of Waiting for Guffman, Parker Posey's audition monologue has enjoyed a modest second life of its own, largely thanks to its popularity among young actresses. Perhaps in Libby Mae, they see a sister-in-arms. I found at least three YouTube "cover versions" of the monologue: here, here, and here.
Meanwhile, in case you have any auditions coming up, WhySanity.net offers a full transcript here. And, of course, it's available -- with or without commentary -- on the Waiting for Guffman DVD.
Ed Wood dons eye shadow and lipstick for his role in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
"It's amazing. I mean, here the guy is a complete failure in our way of thinking. Made schlock pictures, you know. And suddenly, he's famous. It's amazing."
-Director Joe Robertson on the career of Ed Wood
Ed Wood did his fair share of acting.
Is it possible that Ed Wood missed his true calling, but just barely? Consider this assessment made by his biographer, Rudolph Grey, in a conversation with filmmaker Frank Henenlotter in 1994: "What many people don't realize is that Ed was a pretty good actor. He did have an extensive stage background. He did a lot of stage work when he first arrived in Hollywood. I think Ed could've gotten a lot of work as an actor if he had really pursued it, but I don't think that's what he really wanted to do."
Ed certainly had the looks for it, at least in the late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s, before alcoholism had fully taken its ghastly toll on his face and form. Numerous actresses who worked with him during those years, including Valda Hansen and Maila Nurmi, have commented upon his old-fashioned, Errol Flynn-esque handsomeness. And, obviously, he convinced at least two women -- Norma McCarty and Kathy O'Hara -- to marry him during the 1950s. A third paramour, Dolores Fuller, never actually tied the knot with Ed but did leave her own husband, Donald Kenneth Fuller, for him. So Eddie must have had the charisma of a leading man in those days.
But did Ed have the acting chops to go with it? It is my assertion that he did. Obviously, his biggest screen role was in the autobiographical Glen or Glenda? (1953), and during my many viewings of that film, I have been struck time and again by how genuine and vulnerable Eddie is in the title role(s). Viewers tend to be so distracted by that film's wildly improbable dialogue, ludicrous plot, and jerry-rigged construction that they miss out on Ed Wood's true conviction at the center of it.
Take, for instance, the scene in which cross-dresser Glen (Ed Wood) confides in his friend Johnny (Charlie Crafts), a fellow transvestite and, thus, one of the few people on earth who could possibly understand his troubles. Glen is dithering, Hamlet-like, about whether or not to tell his emasculating "secret" to his fiancee, Barbara (Dolores Fuller). In the process, he delivers the following speech, the closest thing to the "to be or not to be" soliloquy in the Wood canon:
"My mind's in a muddle, like in a thick fog. I can't make sense to myself sometimes. I thought I could stop wearing these things. I tried, honestly I tried. I haven't had a stitch of them on for nearly two weeks until tonight. Then I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to put them on or go out of my mind. I'm afraid I'll lose her. I don't want that to happen because... I really love her."
The "muddled mind" monologue has been one of the most frequently-chided passages in any of Wood's films, even turning up in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, but the more I watch Glenda, the more I believe what Ed is saying here. He really does seem like a confused young man with a difficult, high-stakes decision to make. In fact, Glenda is the most emotionally-affecting of Ed Wood's films, and a big part of that is Wood's own lead performance.
Eddie's dialogue is not easy to deliver and make sound believable. Luckily, throughout his career, Wood worked with a few actors, including Bela Lugosi, Tor Johnson, Kenne Duncan, Rene Bond, and even Criswell, whose outsized screen personalities carry them along, no matter what they're saying or doing. But many more actors, veterans and newcomers alike, were defeated by the stilted, arrhythmic lines Eddie gave them to recite.
In the softcore erotic films Ed Wood co-scripted for Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s, Harvey Shane (aka Forman Shane) seems at ease most of the time, but Steve's other regulars, such as Angela Carnon and Terri Johnson, are hopelessly adrift. Performances like these make you realize how good an actor Ed was in comparison.
After Glen or Glenda?, however, acting was never more than a very occasional sideline for Edward D. Wood, Jr. His stage career, the one he'd formally trained for after serving in the Marines, ended when he went into the picture-making business, with the possible exception of 1954's The Bela Lugosi Revue.
As a director, he didn't cast himself nearly as often as he could have, preferring minor walk-on parts to major speaking roles. His gonzo, cross-dressing turn as broken-down madam "Alecia" in Take It Out in Trade is the exception which proves the rule.
Still in all, author David C. Hayes dutifully devotes a chapter of Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to Eddie's talents as a thespian, underused as they might have been. "Ed Wood... the Actor?" (credited to Hayes' jokey alter ego, Hayden Davis, PhD) makes the following modest claim: "Ed Wood Jr. was a good, effective character actor (with a few exceptions)." In building his case, Hayes concentrates on Wood's performance in Glenda, of course, but also details Eddie's late-career acting gigs in other directors' films (e.g. his triple role in Steve Apostolof's Fugitive Girls), as well as the cameos Wood awarded to himself in his own movies (e.g. a nameless tough tussling with Connie Brooks in The Sinister Urge).
Besides Wood himself, the filmmaker who used Ed Wood most prominently as an actor, for better or worse, was independent cinema legend Joseph F. Robertson. And not so coincidentally, it is one of Robertson's films which concerns us this week, my friends...
Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970)
Joe Robertson's film was released as The Sensuous Wife on VHS by Private Screenings.
Mrs. Stone by any other name...
Alternate titles: The film was retitled The Sensuous Wife when it was released on VHS by Private Screenings in 1981. In the current existing version, this new title has been obviously and clumsily inserted into the film. It has also been spotted under the title The Very Sensuous Wife. The West German title, Heisse Fingerspiele, translates as (not kidding) Hot Fingering. I hasten to point out that fingering is not exceptionally essential to the plot of this motion picture, whatever its title may be.
Availability: Though Mrs. Stone's Thing never made it to DVD under its original title, old copies of the Sensuous Wife VHS tape are still available on Amazon. Expect to pay about a hundred bucks, though. Sorry. It's also being sold on iOffer. Good luck.
The backstory: The legendary, three-decade career of exploitation filmmaker Joseph F. "Papa Joe" Robertson (1925-2001) is one I have already covered when I reviewed Love Feast (1969), a softcore film directed by Robertson and written by and starring Ed Wood. Though Joe and Ed did not join forces until the late 1960s, the former had been in the motion picture game for some time. In a few vital ways, the two men led parallel lives. Like Wood, Robertson was born in the state of New York in the mid-1920s, fought as a Marine in World War II, and wound up making low-budget independent feature films once he got back home. Eddie, however, had grown up with a movie camera in his hand, thanks to his father, and started trying to make his own movies professionally as early as 1948. Joe, on the other hand, didn't get into the picture game until the Swinging Sixties.
Neither Wood nor Robertson started out in pornography, furthermore, but both gravitated towards the genre because of its promise of quick profits with low overhead costs. In the early days of his movie career, Joe Robertson produced a trio of drive-in perennials, all non-pornographic: the sci-fi/horror films The Slime People and The Crawling Hand (both 1963) and the James Bond knockoff Agent from H.A.R.M. (1966). As near as I can tell, Joe Robertson's Nixon-era shift to skin flicks coincided with his meeting Edward D. Wood, Jr. Coincidence?
In a retrospective interview with documentarian Ted Newsom in the 1990s, Robertson talked about meeting Ed Wood. Ed's military history, it turns out, was pivotal in their bonding:
Mrs. Stone's Thing director Joseph F. Robertson
"I had done a lot of films, and I was working. And then, as a hobby, I had a very big bar called the Surf Girl. And one night, [Ed] came in, and he was okay. I mean, he wasn't in drag, and he looked pretty good. He didn't look good, but he looked okay. And we had mutual friends that introduced me to him. And he was in the Marine Corps. I was in the Marine Corps. And so we had a certain empathy. We felt for each other on that portion of it. Semper fi. And we talked a lot. And he was quite decorated. And then I got friendly with him.
Robertson told Newsom that these evenings of cross-dressing revelry at the Surf Girl occurred over the course of "three or four years," circa 1966 to 1968, and did coincide with Joe's entrance into softcore adult filmmaking. Robertson was quick to point out, however, that the sex in his early films was "simulated" and "very, very mild," unlike current skin flicks. He knew of which he spoke: At the time of the interview, circa 1994, Robertson was still writing, producing, and directing X-rated feature films as "Adele Robbins," a nom de guerre he picked up in the late 1970s, several years after his association with Ed Wood ended.
In retrospect, considering his Marine past and attendant machismo, Joe Robertson displayed remarkable tolerance for Ed Wood's gender-blurring eccentricities. Rather than shrinking from Ed's transvestism, Joe made it part of the act. In total, Wood and Robertson made three films together, and Eddie dresses in drag in all of them.
Accounts differ as to who did what on these movies. In the Newsom interview, Joe Robertson claimed that he wrote the screenplays for all three of these motion pictures. ("[Ed] didn't [write] for me. I'm a writer, too.") While Joe's sole authorship of Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970) is not in doubt, most sources -- including Ed Wood's own writing resume -- suggest that Eddie himself wrote both Love Feast (aka The Photographer) and Misty (aka Nympho Cycler). Robertson did, however, acknowledge Eddie's writing talent or at least his writing productivity. "Very prolific writer," he told Newsom. "Tremendous. He could turn things out all night and just do a whole script in five or six hours." Nevertheless, Robertson basically thought of Eddie as a charity case, as he explained to Ted Newsom:
"Because of our friendship, I had him in two pictures that I have. Three pictures, actually, that he made for me. He did one in Mrs. Stone's Thing. He did a little funny shtick. That was a big picture. And then I had him in Misty, another one we did, which we can't find, by the way. And then he did The Photographer, which Rhino is distributing. I wrote it. He was the actor in it."
An ex-Marine was simply doing a favor for another, less successful ex-Marine. "At that point," Joe said, Ed Wood "was downhill." But even though Eddie was in physical, financial, and professional decline during its making, Mrs. Stone's Thing was nevertheless a major production for Joe Robertson. While Joe couldn't pin down an exact budget, he pointed out to Ted Newsom that Mrs. Stone's Thing was shot on pricey 35mm film, while Misty and Love Feast were only 16mm. For Joe, Mrs. Stone was an epic. "They had a hundred people in the cast!"
The existing print carries an unmistakably proud credit: "Written & Directed by Joseph F. Robertson." Maybe every low-budget director dreams, if only fleetingly, of being Cecil B. DeMille for a day. This might have been Joe Robertson's The Ten Commandments. It does bear some resemblance to that film's notorious "golden calf" sequence.
Ironically, Robertson would be denied proper directing credit for two of the three films he made with Ed Wood. Rhino Video claimed Eddie directed The Photographer, which it opportunistically renamed Pretty Models All in a Row, while Alpha Blue Archives touted Ed Wood as the director of Nympho Cycler. I don't believe that Rhino or ABA were trying to cheat or shortchange Joe Robertson; the movies were simply more marketable if Ed Wood were listed as their director. In his chat with Ted Newsom, Joe suggested that he may have voluntarily ceded the directing credit to Ed Wood on Love Feast. Maybe it was karmic payback for misspelling his buddy's name as "Ed Woods" in the hand-drawn, hippy-dippy end credits for Mrs. Stone's Thing.
Poor Eddie was credited as "(Mr.) Ed Woods" in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
Victor Rich and Karen Johnson.
As of this writing,Mrs. Stone's Thing is the only one of the Wood/Robertson films not to make it to DVD. To this day, it remains accessible only to collectors and die-hards. Perhaps that's because Eddie's role in it is fleeting and entirely peripheral to the main story. In contrast, Wood was the lead in Love Feast and the husband of the main character in Misty.
Briefly, the plot of Mrs. Stone's Thing revolves around George Stone (one-and-doner Victor Rich), a middle-aged businessman who reluctantly brings his naive, stay-at-home wife Martha (Karen Johnson, also a one-film wonder) to an orgy at the home of a business associate (Ron Dyer, who also appeared in 1969's Dr. Masher with Alice Friedland). Victor Rich and Karen Johnson are the actual stars here.
The film is really about how this wild get-together puts the Stones' marriage to the test. Ed is merely a guest at the party, and he doesn't even show up until about the 30-minute mark. When he does, he essentially plays himself: a hard-drinking, cross-dressing writer. As with the other Robertson films, Eddie does not look healthy here. His face and body are both badly bloated, and his complexion is fish-belly pale. For the benefit of Robertson's camera, Ed clumsily but bravely dons female attire onscreen. With some effort, he squeezes himself into control-top pantyhose, but his booze-filled gut will not be contained. Later in the film, he puts on eye shadow and lipstick and makes faces at the camera. Tongue firmly in cheek as always, author David C. Hayes describes Ed Wood's "smaller" but "no less commanding" role in Mrs. Stone's Thing in gleefully unappetizing yet somehow triumphant terms.
"Wood played Ed, a transvestite writer of smut novels, that attended an orgy party. Unfazed by the rampant sex around him, Ed searched through the house until he found the mistress' bedroom. Changing into a dress, hose and blouse Wood reminds us of his ever-adaptable acting style. At that point, Ed the actor was obviously suffering from the DTs, and shaking like a leaf. He persevered, though, and with shaking hands, funny 'actor' voice and bad girdle jokes Wood applied lipstick. In some ways this can be a testament to the younger actors of today. To the Downeys, Slaters and Sutherlands... chemical abuse is no reason to give a crappy performance."
Most of Eddie's fans have, for obvious reasons of availability, not seen Mrs. Stone's Thing. In their 1994 Cult Movies magazine interview, biographer Rudolph Grey and filmmaker Frank Henenlotter discuss whether this is a good thing. They differ, as you will see, on whether this softccore film is degrading to Ed Wood's image. The two experts also compare Mrs. Stone to the other Robertson films.
Jack King and Nancy Holliday in Mrs. Stone's Thing.
FH: Ed also plays a small role in Robertson's Mrs. Stone's Thing in which he's again in drag. And one of the things that's interesting is that, before Ed's scene, Nancy Holliday, the actress playing his fat wife, talked about Ed as both a transvestite and a prolific writer. She says, "Just because he wears women's clothes around the house, doesn't mean there's anything queer about him..."
RG: Right. The fat woman and the fat guy are in the pool and she's talking about her husband Ed. And Jack King, the fat guy, says Ed's kinda weird and she says something to the effect of, "Everybody has their hang-ups, haven't they? It's all a matter of perspective." Then she says he's really quite brilliant and wrote 28 novels last year.
FH: Ed looks like he's having a good time in that one but, again, seems juiced to the gills. He even comments on how much booze he's had. He also ad-libs a couple of lines which he finds really hilarious and seems to be staring at someone off set as he cracks up.
RG: Well, I find his appearance in that one somewhat depressing. It's almost as if he's being exploited.
FH: He probably was but I get the sense that Ed's also an exhibitionist. I mean, when he's in drag he loves showing off.
RG: Right.
FH: And I don't see where his part in Mrs. Stone's Thing is any less depressing than him licking the boot at the end of Love Feast...
RG: I see your point. But Love Feast seems to be more of an Ed Wood type movie. He wrote Love Feast. I'm not sure he had much to do with Mrs. Stone's Thing. I mean, it just looks like he was drunk, and he's just making an appearance, and he doesn't have much control over the movie or the situation.
FH: You'll notice that although his character is supposed to stumble into the bedroom and find the women's clothing, he's already wearing high heels...
RG: Yeah...
The aforementioned scene involving Nancy Holliday and Jack King, who frolic in an oversized bathtub (not a swimming pool), is one of the most memorably unhinged moments in Mrs. Robertson's Thing. The issue of "who wrote what?" almost becomes irrelevant because long passages of this movie, including this one, seem to be improvised or semi-improvised. In a later scene, Holliday and King sneak away from the party to the mansion's game room and try to have sex on two billiard tables pushed together. It's obvious that the two actors are ad-libbing most of their lines and desperately stalling for time. Judging by what's on the screen, I doubt any of Ed Wood's scenes were tightly scripted. At most, Joe Robertson might have been working from a vague outline. Eddie appears to be winging it most of the time.
In case you never get to see the film, here's a complete breakdown of the Ed Wood content in Mrs. Stone's Thing. Remember, most of this is interspersed with scenes of the party already in progress.
25:36 - Before we ever meet Ed's character, we are introduced to his better half. Ed's roly-poly wife Nancy (Nancy Holliday) is blatantly cheating on him with similarly-zaftig Jack (Jack King). They canoodle in a tub in what looks like a very fancy, ornately-decorated bathroom. Among other things, they talk about Ed's cross-dressing and his writing career. (See Frank Henenlotter and Rudolph Grey's comments above.)
30:41 - Ed's first appearance is in what seems to be the master bedroom, where he has secluded himself away from the other guests. Wearing a drab, long-sleeved brown shirt and matching trousers, he takes a moment to regard a squawking parrot. Then he sits down on the bed and sniffs a pair of panties, all while squinting and rubbing his face. He looks around to see if anyone's watching, then takes off his pants and shirt.
31:39 - Now nude except for pantyhose, Ed steps into a pair of matronly-looking white panties.
32:55 - Ed now dons a hot pink brassiere and admires himself in the mirror. At this point, a blonde-haired woman walks into the bedroom, sees Ed, and becomes goggle-eyed in horror.
33:29 - Ed is modestly covering himself up when a shirtless man walks into the bedroom. It's a fellow we recognize from earlier in the movie as George Stone's friend and coworker. "What do we have here?" says the man. Ed giggles and shyly turns away. The man reassures him: "That's all right! You look nice!" "Oh, come on!" says Ed, humbly. Gesturing to some other clothes on the bed, the man suggests: "Why don't you try the rest of them on?"
34:02 - As the shirtless man looks on admiringly, Ed holds a black and grey dress in front of him. "It looks cute!" enthuses the man. "Oh, this is crazy!" replies Ed. "What would my wife say?" "She'll never find out," says the man. "And that gang downstairs?" asks Ed. "I'll never tell 'em," the man says. "Put it on!" "Why not?" reasons Ed. "I'm game for anything after all that booze you had down there!" When the man tells Ed he looks "like my wife" in the dress, Ed replies: "Good Lord! If she's this fat, we don't want to worry about that, do we?"
34:35 - "I didn't know you were this cute, you know that?" enthuses the man. Ed says, "I need a girdle." But he fits into the dress anyway. The man then advises him, "Look in the mirror! Isn't that something?" Ed asks the parrot for a review: "What do you think about that, Polly?" Turning back to his human guest, Ed says, "Let's go get another one!"
42:22 - Still wearing the dress, Ed runs his hands up and down his legs in the hosiery. Then he looks in the mirror and squints while applying lipstick. He slips a pink satin robe over the dress and again admires his reflection. He twirls, tousles his hair, and strikes "model" poses. But then Ed's enormous wife, Nancy, enters the room, and Ed runs for cover. "Uh oh! You've had it doc!" says the parrot. "Oh, the Age of Discovery!" yells the wife. "Have I got a great idea! Have I got a girl for you!" She then drags a reluctant Ed out of the bedroom by his arm.
43:15 - Ed and Nancy are now downstairs, in the thick of the party. Nancy says to one blonde-wigged party-goer: "I would like you to meet my husband." This mysterious stranger turns around and reveals himself to be... another man in drag! Ed rolls his eyes. "Oh, how very fascinating!" says the second cross-dresser, as he sizes Ed up.
A Mia Coco pictorial.
Like its two uninspiring leads, most of the actors in Mrs. Stone's Thing had never been in a movie before this and would never make another one after this.
Jack King is the obvious exception, Perhaps best known for his turn as a doomed grandfather in The Creeping Terror (1964), this distinctive character actor brought his round physique, gruff voice, and bushy beard to a number of low-budget films, nearly all of them pornographic, from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s. Ed Wood fans will know him, for instance, as the storyteller -- a sort of Cro Magnon Criswell -- from Ed De Priest's One Million AC/DC (1969), where he was also scantily clad but seemingly not self-conscious about his appearance. (In Mrs. Stone, King's weight becomes an issue when he tries to mount Nancy Holliday, but neither actor seems terribly bothered by it.) Joe Robertson cast Jack King again in A Touch of Sweden (1971), just a year after Mrs. Stone. And Pete Perry (who directed 1959's Revenge of the Virgins) used Jack in The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet (1969).
Meanwhile, viewers familiar with Love Feast may recognize busty, flirtatious Mia Coco. A prominent pinup model in the 1960s and 1970s, she was the lone African-American in the Love Feast cast, and she turns up as an aptly-named "scene stealer" in Mrs. Stone. At one point, she even wriggles like a snake across the prone bodies of the partygoers.
The other name which immediately jumps out from the credits of Mrs. Stone's Thing is that of Hal Guthu, who acted as the director of photography, just as he did on Love Feast. Guthu was better known as an agent for nude models and porn actresses, so I'm guessing he might have supplied some of the female talent on (abundant) display here, including Ms. Coco.
The film's second director of photography was Robert "Bob" Maxwell, who was a very busy cameraman and gaffer in '60s and '70s cult cinema. His credits include Orgy of the Dead (1965), Girl in Gold Boots (1968), and the revolutionary Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). Born on Christmas Day in 1923, Maxwell was just a few months older than Ed Wood. Sadly, they both died at the age of 54 in December 1978. Bob outlived Ed by just twelve days.
On a happier note, Mrs. Stone's Thing acts as yet another accidental documentary -- one of many in Ed Wood's filmography -- of what Los Angeles, California looked like during the Laugh-In years. Joe Robertson shot a lot of location footage for this film, and he managed to capture some now-long-gone landmarks in the process. During the title sequence, for example, we see actor Victor Rich walking through downtown L.A.'s Century City Mall in pursuit of a sexy young thing with an admirable disdain for underwear. His travels take him past the 55-story headquarters of Security Pacific National Bank, which later became Bank of America Plaza.
He also saunters past the impressive-from-the-outside Century House Restaurant, which was also glimpsed in 1967's A Guide for the Married Man. A website called Old L.A. Restuarants called the Century House "a decent place to grab a bite if you were shopping over there but that's about it."
The original George and Martha.
The viewing experience: Like surveying the ruins of Pompeii after that doomed ancient city was buried in lava, its citizens uncannily preserved just as they were before Vesuvius blew its stack. Mrs. Stone's Thing, from its slangy title onward, is unmistakably the product of a lost era.
This was back when middle-aged people, like the ones largely in charge of the motion picture industry, were desperately trying to figure out the so-called counterculture so as to subdue it, exploit it, or both.
This film might make interesting viewing for superfans of Mad Men, as it also concerns liquor-swilling, suit-wearing executives awash in the Age of Aquarius. This film's lead character, George Stone, could even be a refugee from that departed AMC series. He's an arrogant, womanizing businessman who wears ascots and keeps his silver hair immaculately groomed -- a strutting peacock of a man. His views toward women, predictably, languish in a pre-feminist hinterland; George likely takes his cues directly from Hugh Hefner in his dealings with the fairer sex. He expects his wife, Martha, to remain faithful to him and stay at home, mixing his martinis, while he dashes off to bacchanals which would make Caligula blush.
In other words, George Stone is no hippie, yet he wants to reap the sensual pleasures -- namely, casual sex with attractive and anonymous young women -- of the hippie lifestyle. If there is a common thread in the three Wood/Robertson films, it is of the older generation essentially cannibalizing the younger one. Incidentally, I don't think it's a mere coincidence that the husband and wife in this movie are named George and Martha. These monikers remind us not only of George and Martha Washington, the Father and First Lady of our country, but also of George and Martha from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which Mike Nichols turned into an acclaimed film in 1966 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Set mainly at the lavish estate of a free-spending tycoon, Mrs. Stone's Thing centers around a wild party which quickly evolves/devolves into a full-scale orgy. Sex and drugs are in full evidence here, and the third component of the hippie holy trinity, rock 'n' roll, is present in the form of a fuzzy-haired, bongo-bashing acid rock combo whose repertoire includes an instrumental cover of "Johnny B. Goode."
Yet all of this is ostensibly being done in the name of commerce. George is attending this event in order to make business contracts. Getting loaded and screwing flower children are just components of his job. Mrs. Stone's Thing takes place firmly within the territory of the Establishment, not the counterculture. The dozens of nude, gyrating young people in attendance seem to have been rented and bused in especially for the occasion. Do they know or care that they are on enemy turf?
Russ Meyer favorite Princess Livingston
More than anything, Mrs. Stone's Thing reminded me of Russ Meyer's contemporaneous Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which was also chiefly set at the plush estate of an eccentric, party-happy millionaire. The two films even share a piece of prominently-used stock music -- a bouncy, harpsichord-accented twist rocker which could only have come from the 1960s. (It sounds like something from Hullaballoo or Shindig!)
Like Beyond the Valley, Mrs. Stone allows us to eavesdrop on a ridiculously over-the-top, sex-and-drug-fueled Hollywood party attended by lots of young, well-tanned "beautiful people," along with a few grotesques and eccentrics for good measure. Ed Wood, I'm afraid, is intended as one of the grotesques, as are Nancy Holliday and Jack King, who share his inconsequential sub-sub-subplot. They serve essentially the same function for Robertson as the cackling, toothless hag Princess Livingston did for Meyer. (Meyer cast Livingston four times, including Beyond the Valley. She died in 1976.) They're there to remind us just how absolutely anarchic this party is. Anything goes, baby! Just look what kinds of freaks we let through the door! Whee!
This is not to say that Robertson's film was influenced by Russ Meyer. Joe Robertson might never have even seen one of Meyer's films. But I'll be damned if Mrs. Stone's Thing doesn't seem like it was edited together from footage Meyer left on the cutting room floor while making Beyond the Valley. George Stone is certainly the kind of square-jawed man's man Meyer used repeatedly. (Meyer regular Charles Napier would have been perfect for the role.)
And Robertson often uses oddball camera angles and frenetic editing in Mrs. Stone, just as Meyer did in Beyond the Valley. When Mia Coco slinks through the party in Robertson's movie, furthermore, it reminded me of Haji wearing little more than black body paint as the "Cat Lady" in Beyond the Valley. Even the absurdly old-fashioned ending of Mrs. Stone's Thing, in which George and Martha decide to forget all this "orgy" nonsense and start a family, runs parallel to the utterly square epilogue and "triple wedding"conclusion of Beyond the Valley.
An upsetting flashback from Mrs. Stone's Thing.
The main difference between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Mrs. Stone's Thing is one of tone. Meyer's film, which was scripted by famed critic Roger Ebert, is slyly self-aware, deliberately outrageous, and steeped in parody, irony, satire, and real-world cultural references ranging from Lawrence Welk to Muhammad Ali. Robertson's film has virtually none of these attributes.
Irony was never Ed Wood's strong suit, and that much-abused word does not even seem to be in Joe Roberton's cinematic vocabulary. Both Beyond and Mrs. Stone contain scenes of strong sexuality and violence, sometimes in alarming combination, but I believe such moments in Mrs. Stone's Thing are meant to be taken seriously and at face value. In Meyer's film, in contrast, everything's a put-on, including the Nazi bartender (who appears in full uniform at one point) and the musclebound hunk who is brutally decapitated by a vengeful transsexual. One potentially-disturbing subplot in Beyond the Valley concerns a young lesbian (Cynthia Myers) who is raped -- off-camera -- by a male friend (David Gurian), who in turn is driven to attempt suicide. It sounds grim, but the film treats these events like everything else in the script, i.e. as stylized, soap opera-style camp.
The characters in Beyond the Valley may take themselves and their problems quite seriously, but the movie doesn't. It's analogous to the treatment of Adam West and Burt Ward in the '60s Batman TV show. We know the show is a goof even if they don't.
On the other hand, Mrs. Stone's Thing has a dark subplot about a lesbian party guest (Toni Demoulin) who was raped by her father (Reb Rebel) as an adolescent and consequently grows up to be a rapist herself, forcing herself on another female party guest. For reasons of his own, Joe Robertson includes numerous, mood-killing flashbacks to this poor woman's terrible childhood. We witness, first-hand, the rape and abuse of both the mother and the daughter at the hands of the father. And then we have to watch as the now-grown woman continues the cycle of abuse with a new victim. Unlike a Russ Meyer film, there is not a hint of parody or irony in any of this. This material is played as strictly traumatic and upsetting. What this stuff is doing in an erotic film is beyond me.
And yet, despite all this, the overall mood of Mrs. Stone's Thing is celebratory, up to and including Ed Wood's cameo. Some awful things may be happening in the back bedrooms here, but otherwise this party seems like a lot of fun. This house has everything: a swimming pool with a water slide, a deluxe game room, body painting, plenty of colorful beach towels you can use in light S&M scenarios, a wisecracking parrot, one of those hanging wicker chairs (like the one in Bloomer Girls), hordes of attractive naked people, a full assortment of drugs and alcohol, a very decent rock combo, and even a monkey! And you can make important business contacts here, too? Who wouldn't want to go to this party?
Like Joseph F. Robertson's other films of the period, Misty (1971) and The Love Feast (1969), Mrs. Stone's Thing has a repetitive yet insidiously catchy theme song that semi-successfully summarizes the plot of the movie. In this case, it's a "bubblegum psychedelic" ditty called "Mrs. Stone Wants To Swing" by a group called Kent & The Candidates. Consisting of Kent Sprague, Mo Rodgers, Reginal Douglas, and Walter P. Smith, this group existed from 1967 to 1971. They released singles on several labels, including Liberty and Double Shot. Kent wrote for other prominent acts of the era, including Three Dog Night and Brenton Wood.
"Mrs. Stone Wants to Swing" reminds me of Donovan's "Mellow Yellow," mixed with The Beatles' "Getting Better," The Turtles' "Happy Together," and any number of Monkees B-sides. If this whets your appetite, there's an entire compilation called The Best of Kent and the Candidates.
NEXT: How low can you go? It's a matter of opinion, of course, but there are arguably few assignments in filmmaking lower than directing pornographic loops. But that is one of the many odd jobs Ed Wood took in the 1970s, when feature film gigs were hard to come by and even his short stories and novels weren't paying the bills. These types of films might seem to be extremely ephemeral. After all, who would think to preserve them? And yet, miraculously, some of Ed Wood's X-rated loops have survived to this day and age, and I am now preparing to review them for your benefit. Join me back here in two weeks, and together we will enter the realm ofSwedish Erotica.
