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

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

Hot Flicks magazine from 1972.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help me ID all the caricatures in the Comedy Store's Twitter background!

The Comedy Store's Twitter background features some vague, tough-to-identify caricatures.

The Store, still on Sunset Boulevard.

Because of Marc Maron's twice-weekly WTF podcast, I've become fascinated with the Comedy Store, a West Hollywood comedy club that for over 40 years has served as a launchpad/proving ground for many aspiring stand-ups and that has also offered established funnymen and women a venue to try out their material in front of a live audience.

Over the years, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Pryor, and many more have put in time at the Comedy Store. Marc Maron is a stand-up comic himself, as are the majority of his guests, and "The Store" looms large in their mythology.

The club was founded in 1972 by Sammy Shore (Pauly Shore's father) and Rudy De Luca, who is best known for his many collaborations with Mel Brooks (Silent Movie, Life Stinks, and more). In 1973, Sammy lost ownership of the club in a divorce settlement with his wife, Mitzi Shore (Pauly's mom). Mitzi then used this opportunity to become a self-appointed doyenne of the humor business for decades, offering career guidance to up-and-comers and dating many comedians (including Barney Miller's Steve Landesberg). Now in her 80s and in failing health, Mitzi has ceded control of the Store to others.

But the legend of the Comedy Store continues to grow. Looming largest of all in the mythology is a five-week period in 1979 when many of the venue's regular comedians went on "strike" for nonpayment, including Steve Lubetkin, who expressed his displeasure with Shore's managerial style by jumping off the roof of the building next door, killing himself in the process.

When Maron and other comedians speak of the Comedy Store, it is with a mixture of awe, terror, loyalty, and repulsion. The place seems to have a demonic, semi-seedy vibe to it. What other comedy club has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries? I sincerely hope that Maron someday writes a book called simply The Store. I'd buy the hell out of it.

I've only recently started following the Comedy Store on Twitter, and I couldn't help but notice a picture they were using as their background image. It's a collage of the famous comedians who have played the Store over the years, surrounded by stars and planets.

I'd like to think I'm fairly up on comedy history, but I can't quite identify all the people in this picture. I used the Wikipedia list of Comedy Store alumni, which helped a bit, but there were still a few folks I couldn't place. Maybe you'll do better than I did. Below, you'll see the five "unknown comics" in the constellation. I'm pretty sure the guy on the right is supposed to be Letterman's pal Jeff Altman, but I'm not 100% certain on that. The drawing is so nonspecific that it could be Louie Anderson.

The other four have me stumped. The three guys on the left look like rock stars, and the one woman could be anybody from Elayne Boosler to Roseanne Barr to Gilda Radner.

Look it over and make your best guesses. Thanks.

Here are five famous Comedy Store veterans I can't identify. (Except the last one is probably Jeff Altman.)

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

If you like the intersection, you'll love the movie.

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: 

• James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie)

• Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty)

• Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick)

• Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild)

• Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor")

• Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950)

• Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met.

Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero.

Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy.

The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle."

Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it.

By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that.

Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak.

Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.