Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 43: 'The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.' (1995)

A selection of posters, DVD/VHS covers, and handbills related to Brett Thompson's 1995 documentary.

"This film is a true story. The screenplay is based on court testimony, sworn declarations, and hundreds of interviews conducted by the filmmakers. Some of the innocent characters' names have been changed in the interest of a larger truth. No one involved in the crimes received any form of financial compensation." 

-prologue from John Waters' Serial Mom (1994)

Aleister Crowley

In 1899, when he was about 24 years old, infamous English occultist and writer Aleister Crowley purchased and moved into the historic Boleskine House near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands with the intent of performing a complicated six-month ritual called the Abramelin. The rarely performed rite, which dates back to the 14th Century, is supposed to allow one to "master" demons.

Already an avid fornicator and the pseudonymous author of lewd poetry, Crowley was anxious by this point in his still-young life to delve into the world of genuine black magic, not mere play-acting, and thought that the Abramelin was his passport to a world of untapped power. The ceremony's dangerous and foreboding reputation, which was enough to keep the superstitious Scottish locals safely away from Boleskine, was likely a great enticement to the insatiable thrill-seeker, whose own religious upbringing was almost perversely pious.

But history records that Aleister Crowley abandoned the ritual before he had completed it. Why? As the late Colin Wilson testified in the 2002 made-for-TV documentary Masters of Darkness: Aleister Crowley - The Wickedest Man in the World: "He just couldn't be bothered to go on, because it really is pretty exhausting, you know, living on bread and water and getting up at 3:00 in the morning with invocations and all kinds of things. It's nothing as much as like being a monk, only harder. And so Crowley gave it up." England's most prolific and well-publicized sinner went on to other, presumably more entertaining forms of debauchery.

Edward Alexander Crowley died in 1947, the very year a young man named Edward Davis Wood, Jr. moved to Hollywood. Since July 2013, I have been rigorously documenting the life and career of Ed Wood. A year ago, I introduced Ed Wood Wednesdays with a brief essay summarizing my interest in the unusual director and his idiosyncratic films. I have since written 43 further installments, each one scrutinizing some particular aspect of Edward D. Wood, Jr's life and career.

This project has required me to spend many hours alone, hovering over a laptop computer, with only the endless drone of an electric fan to keep me company. In short, Ed Wood Wednesdays has become my personal Abramelin ritual, and its creation has been an arduous, almost monastic experience for me. But unlike the Abremlin, Ed Wood Wednesdays has no predetermined ending point. I have no idea when this series will be "finished."

Captain DeZita: A satyr?

Like the eager young Aleister Crowley at Boleskine, I embarked upon this strange project because it had a faint air of wickedness about it. That must have been my motivation. I cannot precisely remember at this late juncture.

From his angora sweaters to his Imperial whiskey, Ed Wood was a man with an aura of sin and indulgence. He was determined to seek pleasure in life, even if his desires were at odds with societal norms or his own best interests. At his most respectable, Ed made extremely low-budget movies about tacky topics like "monsters, graves, [and] bodies," to quote Paul Marco in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). 

At his least respectable, a mullet-sporting and booze-bloated Eddie Wood, clad in sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt, coaxed Ric Lutze to have sex in a century-old coffin on the set of the hardcore porno film Necromania (1971). Crowley himself might have admired that singularly-offensive moment and nodded with approval at Eddie's deliberate flaunting of taboos, particularly his brazen intermingling of sex and death.

It's worth pointing out that numerous people who knew Ed Wood have compared him to a satyr, a half-man/half-goat figure of ancient Greek lore associated with drunkenness and lust. The infrequently-used term satyriasis, the male equivalent of nymphomania, takes its name from these mythical woodland gods. It is interesting to note that the hairy, horned Devil (played by strip club booking agent Captain DeZita) who attends Ed Wood's dream wedding in Glen or Glenda (1953) physically resembles a satyr.

Aleister Crowley received a similarly animalistic appellation in his youth; his stern mother called him "the Beast," a nickname he later self-applied with bravado as an adult. England's popular press, however, referred to Crowley as "the Wickedest Man in the World," which seems only a short distance away from the label imposed by American critics upon Ed Wood, "the Worst Director of All Time." Both of these remarkable men suffered greatly for their excesses, and neither was a stranger to the "demons" of bankruptcy, failed marriages, and ill-health. The key difference is that Crowley reveled in his notorious reputation, while Wood longed for (bu never achieved) mainstream respectability.

And now, with the due diligence of a monk, I give you my thoughts on a highly unusual and artful mid-1990s documentary that seeks to put Edward D. Wood, Jr. into his proper historical context.

THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EDWARD D. WOOD, JR. (1995)

Alternate titles: The Haunted World of Ed Wood [informal title sometimes seen on the internet]; The Dark World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. [Venezuela], The Bizarre World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. [Italy]

Availability: The film is easily available for about $10 on a standalone DVD (Image Entertainment, 2002) or as part of the six-disc collection The Ed Wood Box (Image, 2004).

C.J. Thomas

The backstory: Like many of Ed Wood's own movies, The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. owes its existence to a series of quirky coincidences and arbitrary connections.

The unlikely acorn from which this oak grew was Crossroads of Laredo, the would-be Western that Ed Wood started but abandoned back in 1948. Wood's producing partner on the ill-fated oater was one Crawford John Thomas (1929-1998), a dashing fellow Eddie met during his days as a struggling stage actor in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. At the time, Thomas was flush with cash, thanks to a $2,000 inheritance that he was eager to spend. Thus was formed a doomed and short-lived enterprise called Wood-Thomas Productions.

While Wood went on to a lengthy and improbable career in motion pictures, one that stretched on for three decades, the moribund Crossroads marked the simultaneous beginning and end of C.J. Thomas' showbiz aspirations. A half-hour of grainy silent footage was all that Crawford's inheritance money had reaped, perhaps a pitiful monument to an expired dream but at least something tangible he could show to people. Many of Hollywood's thwarted aspirants don't wind up with any type of souvenir, let alone a movie connected to a prominent director with "name value."

Still in all, the unsatisfactory experience with Ed Wood on Crossroads of Laredo took a heavy toll on Crawford John Thomas, and he was bitter about the subject for a long, long while -- whole decades, in fact. He just couldn't shake it. It was like a toothache that wouldn't go away. Eventually, though, his mercurial ex-partner became a prominent laughingstock, and the scathing reviews earned by Ed Wood's movies became a sort of Novocaine to Thomas. The pain was eased, and he could find amusement in the whole silly saga.

By the 1990s, Thomas was a roofer and had been happily married to a woman named Pat for many years. And yet, the dream of finally completing and releasing Crossroads had never vanished from his mind. Perhaps, he felt, there was still time to shepherd the film to its well-earned destiny. A decades-old wrong could be righted.

The two men largely tasked with helping Thomas achieve this deferred dream were director Brett Thompson, an independent filmmaker whose Not Since Casanova (1988) had attracted some undeniably Wood-ian reviews, and neophyte producer Alan Doshna. Thomas and Doshna were members of the same church, and they both participated in the religious institution's Toastmasters-like public speaking group. Doshna must have been significantly impressed by Thomas' "icebreaker" presentation, during which the erstwhile film mogul spoke of his show business roots, including the fact that his father had been a dialogue coach to actor John Barrymore.

The first notable flowering of this church-based friendship was the 1992 documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion, in which Thomas appeared as himself, giving testimony about his time with Ed Wood and in so doing introducing himself to many of Wood's fans. Doshna was among those receiving special thanks in the credits of Flying Saucers, presumably for acting as a consultant or contributor in some undefined capacity on the project.

Brett Thompson, meanwhile, met Thomas through a Pasadena attorney named Dan Hogue and visited Crawford and Pat at their home, where Crawford had an entire wall of his office decorated with stills from Crossroads of Laredo. Pat would later humorously recall that the ebullient and chatty Thompson was so enthusiastic about the project that he rather overstayed his welcome that night. But the director's interest in the still-unedited Crossroads was both strong and genuine, and C.J. Thomas happily placed the film in this new director's care.

Sufficiently impressed: Maila Nurmi

Brett Thompson's original plan for Crossroads of Laredo was to edit the footage together into some semblance of continuity, add a musical soundtrack and narration, and augment this with perhaps "twenty minutes" of newly-shot interviews with people associated with Ed Wood. Thompson was as good as his word. Crossroads was eventually completed along these lines in 1995; its finished version contained an explanatory preamble by an ascot-wearing C.J. Thomas himself, accompanied by Dolores Fuller, Ed Wood's one-time girlfriend, muse, and leading lady, who also contributed several newly-written songs to the soundtrack. But that idea of adding "twenty minutes" of supplemental interview footage eventually grew into a separate, 112-minute feature film entitled The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Thompson was surprisingly successful in corralling actors, friends, and technicians from Eddie's past, though there were some initial hiccups in this process. Thompson reports that many of these folks were hesitant about participating in The Haunted World because previous Wood-related endeavors, such as the Medved brothers' Golden Turkey Awards book in 1980, had made them the subject of scorn and ridicule.

The project's first significant "get" was Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, the classic horror hostess who had begrudgingly appeared as the Ghoul's Wife in Plan 9 from Outer Space during a late-1950s career slump after she'd lost her gig on Los Angeles television. Nurmi did not often speak to the press about her tarnished movie career, particularly the downmarket Plan 9, but Brett Thompson allayed her fears by treating her, quite literally, as royalty. In the finished film, Nurmi is seated upon a throne, carefully lit and wrapped in scarves, amid a lavish recreation of the set of her '50s TV series. Thompson even went so far as to hire a Vampira impersonator (current high school drama teacher Tomi Griffin) to don a form-fitting black shroud similar to the one Nurmi had worn four decades previously, including an impossible 16" waistline, and glide across the set for purely atmospheric purposes.

Aided and abetted by art director Gregg Lacy and cinematographer David J. Miller, Brett Thompson set out to make a highly stylized, visually attractive film that eschewed the "sensible" plain-jane, talking-head approach of most pop culture docs and instead aped the look of Hollywood's Technicolor triumphs of the past. Toward this end, the director was meticulous about the lighting, costumes, and set decorations of his film, even though it was non-fiction in nature. To put it in 1950s terms, this project was guided more by the aesthetic spirit of Douglas Sirk than that of Edward R. Murrow.

Rather than simply conveying information in a straightforward manner, as is the custom in most non-fiction films, Thompson sought to create evocative and eye-catching tableaux through all the tricks of the cinematic trade. This risky, unorthodox approach remains the most salient feature of The Haunted World, the one factor that sets it apart from other documentaries about Ed Wood. It is certainly unique to my experience as a moviegoer.

Dolores Fuller, both in the flesh and in oil.

Whether or not you approve of the director's methods (critic Rob Craig does; Wood historian Philip R. Frey does not), one fact is inarguable: Brett Thompson's deliberately flattering, almost fawning portrayal of his subjects was crucial to the successful completion of The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Whatever educational merit the film may have, it certainly gathers a number of key players in the Ed Wood saga and presents them in a visually arresting way. As many of these people have since passed away, The Haunted World now serves as a kind of celluloid yearbook.

Once word of Thompson's deluxe treatment of Maila Nurmi began to spread, more and more of the so-called "Wood spooks" agreed to participate in the project. This word-of-mouth phenomenon is similar to what happened with Aris Iliopulos' I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, another '90s Ed Wood tribute film with an enthusiastic young director at its helm.

To justify the confidence that his "witnesses" (as they were termed in the film's closing credits) placed in him,Thompson went well out of his way to distinguish his interviewees from one another. He placed them in colorful costumes and photographed them with special props, sets, and lighting. C.J. Thomas, for instance, appears in a facsimile of the office he once shared with Ed Wood in the 1940s. (His widow Pat remembered that her husband kept the door of the set as a souvenir.) Actors Conrad Brooks and David Ward, both long-time friends of Ed, show up in dandified cowboy clothes. Brooks is even granted a fake cactus and a wooden fencepost against which to lean. Reverend Lynn Lemon, the real-life preacher who both appeared in and helped finance Plan 9 from Outer Space, appears to be bathed in heavenly light and has his wife, Velma, staring up at him in silent adoration as he speaks.

Dolores Fuller, whose scenes were filmed near her Las Vegas home, poses proudly in front of an oil portrait of herself from the early 1960s. Harry Thomas, Ed Wood's makeup man throughout the 1950s, is seated next a makeup table on a sound stage, just as you'd expect him to be. Bela Lugosi, Jr., a dead ringer for his dad and one of the few "witnesses" to speak out directly against Ed Wood in the film, is presented in a faux-Gothic milieu appropriate for the son of movie royalty, complete with a velvet curtain, an ornate candelabra, and a chambermaid at his service. This nonspeaking servant is also portrayed by Tomi Griffin, the Vampira impersonator, her dual role perhaps a sly nod to Una O'Connor in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Only a few interviewees -- among them actor Lyle Talbot (of Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 fame), actress Loretta King (Bride of the Monster's ingenue), and director Joe Robertson (who turned Ed's Love Feast screenplay into a movie in 1969) -- are shot in the prosaic, head-and-shoulders manner we expect from documentaries. Deep-voiced actor Gregory Walcott, the hero of Plan 9 and another Wood skeptic, serves as a quasi-anchorman for the film and is depicted on a pedestal against a white backdrop, giving him a God-like authority.

Understandably, these witnesses tend to talk about themselves nearly as much as they talk about Ed Wood, and in fact there is very little revealed about Wood in The Haunted World that his fans won't already know. The same old anecdotes, including the one about Ed wearing a bra and panties under his uniform in WWII, are rehashed once again. For the true novices in the audience, there are also brief primers on such prominent Wood stock players as Criswell and Tor Johnson.

Among the revelations, culled both from the film itself and its DVD commentary track:

Ed Wood, Sr. and Lillian Wood

• We are treated to very rare photographs of Ed Wood as a child in Poughkeepsie, NY, and some vintage snapshots of his parents, Ed, Sr. and Lillian. Honestly, before revisiting The Haunted World, I had very little idea about what Ed's father truly looked like. The DVD is worth purchasing because it contains a storehouse of photographs and facsimiles of documents, including a letter that Ed wrote to his mother during the Second World War.

• Bela Lugosi, Jr. reads a reverent passage concerning his father from Ed Wood's unpublished autobiography. Apparently, such a manuscript exists and is in the possession of Lugosi, Jr. Though Bela's son speaks harshly of Ed Wood in The Haunted World, his attitude has noticeably softened by the time of the recording of the commentary track five years later. In the movie, Lugosi, Jr. calls Ed "a user and a loser" and says that the director exploited his father. In the commentary track, though, he describes Ed Wood as "energetic," "persistent," and "very respectful" of Lugosi, Sr. He also admits that Eddie "kept Dad working near the end of his career." Lugosi, Jr.'s own dealings with Ed Wood were fleeting. Sometime in the 1970s, the younger Lugosi was assembling a biography of his famous father and dispatched Robert Kramer to interview Eddie on tape. At a couple of points in The Haunted World, we get to hear some ultra-rare, low-fi excerpts of Wood speaking to Kramer about Bela. It would seem that Lugosi, Jr. has a storehouse of unreleased material related to Ed Wood, including a transcript of the Kramer interview.

• Maila Nurmi, captured in a delightfully naughty and gossipy mood, casually dishes about her affair with Ed Wood's idol, Orson Welles. The director of Citizen Kane gave her "the clap" (gonorrhea) and once complimented her on having a "magnificent carcass." As for the origins of her Vampira character, Nurmi is blunt. It was a direct ripoff of Charles Addams' famous character, Morticia. The gimmick of wearing a waist-cinching corset, which Nurmi picked up from BDSM magazines, was added to distinguish Vampira from Morticia. The actress also recalls her days as a dancer on Broadway and remembers being fired by Mae West, with whom she later reconciled through the intercession of Criswell, who was West's personal psychic and close friend.

Ed Wood directed a commercial for Pyequick.

• A charming excerpt from a very early and primitive Ed Wood-directed TV commercial for a product called Pyequick from Betty Crocker is briefly seen in The Haunted World. Among the cast members of the commercial is Wood regular "Duke" Moore. A few seconds of the ad are shown in the main body of the film and a few more are included in the closing credits. As far as I know, this commercial has not appeared elsewhere.

• Crawford John Thomas was so shaken by the failure of Crossroads of Laredo that he considered suicide. (Shades of Phil Tucker, the hapless director of Robot Monster.) Thomas actually recites the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet while recalling this aspect of his life. This, coupled with the detail about the wall of his house devoted to Crossroads of Laredo, also reminded me of Dickens' Miss Havesham.

• Dolores Fuller confirms that she was very uncomfortable with Ed Wood's tranvestism and that she was often embarrassed by his demonstrative, outlandish behavior. While she did eventually leave Eddie to pursue a successful career as a songwriter, penning tunes for Elvis Presley and Nat "King" Cole, she is far from the temperamental, selfish diva portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. In the commentary, Brett Thompson states that he wanted to give Fuller a chance to tell her side of the story. He also points out that she was the breadwinner in her relationship with Ed Wood and appeared on two national television series: Chevy Playhouse and Queen for a Day. In discussing her songwriting career, Fuller seems most proud of "Have a Happy," a tune she wrote for Elvis to sing in the movie Change of Habit (1969) and the philosophical, reflective "Someone to Tell it To," which was performed by Nat "King" Cole. Fuller recites the lyrics of the latter song towards the end of The Haunted World and is on the verge of tears throughout.

• Dolores was by no means perfect, however. Just as you see in Ed Wood, she was absolutely furious when Eddie gave the leading female role in Bride of the Monster to Loretta King under the mistaken impression that King would invest in the picture. For her part, King -- who met Brett Thompson through a Hollywood memorabilia dealer -- seems genuinely innocent and totally unaware of all these backstage machinations. And that weird urban legend about her never drinking water? A silly lie, says King. She doesn't know how that story got started. 

• By far, the best moment in the King interview is an anecdote about how a jilted and jealous Dolores Fuller called her in the middle of the night and asked her how it felt to steal a part that rightfully belonged to someone else. King, a veritable babe in the woods, was dumbfounded by this. As far as she was concerned, she got the part fair and square through her agent. I was wondering how Brett Thompson got away with including this potentially libelous story in his film, but on the DVD commentary, he said that Dolores owned up to it.

• Ed Wood was sincerely religious, and he and Dolores made some elaborate 3D Christmas cards with Ed himself playing the role of Jesus. I'd seen a tiny, two-dimensional picture of Ed as Christ in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, but Brett Thompson includes multiple images of these cards with the red and blue outlines intact. If you watch this part of the film with traditional 3D glasses, the effect actually works! I was pleasantly surprised.

Firebrand: Billy Sunday

• We all know that the Baptist church that funded Plan 9 from Outer Space hoped to used the profits to produce a biopic about evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935). The Haunted World contains newsreel footage from one of Sunday's sermons, and it's easy to see why the well-meaning Baptist parishioners thought that Sunday was a worthy subject for a motion picture. He's a very dynamic and demonstrative speaker. In fact, it would have been difficult for any actor to outdo the real man.

• Thompson could not get all of the surviving Plan 9 cast members to participate in The Haunted World. Bunny Breckenridge (the Ruler) was far too ill at the time. Dudley Manlove (Eros) was living somewhere "out in the desert" by then and couldn't be bothered. And Joanna Lee (Tanna) intentionally distanced herself from Plan 9 after becoming a successful screenwriter. She wouldn't come anywhere near The Haunted World. Additionally, bodybuilder Steve Reeves, one of the stars of Wood's Jail Bait, begged off because he was afraid of being mocked. It's worth noting that Reeves did agree to speak to Rudolph Grey for the book Nightmare of Ecstasy.

• For the most part, the interviewees were a joy to work with, says Thompson. Paul Marco, however, stuck around the studio to watch other people being filmed and took exception to what Gregory Walcott had to say. Marco also got into some sort of scuffle with Harry Thomas, which is hard to believe because Thomas is the easily the most forgiving and gentle person in the entire movie. The director even compares him to the title character from Forrest Gump. On his commentary track for Plan 9 from Outer Space included in The Big Box of Wood, filmmaker Ted Newsom alleges that Paul Marco was unbalanced and paranoid toward the end of his life. Perhaps that was the root of Marco's problems on the set of The Haunted World. 

• While Kathy Wood is not interviewed and is barely mentioned during this movie, Eddie's first wife Norma McCarty is a full-fledged participant, as is her son Michael. Norma, a prim and sweet-faced grandmotherly type, says that she was scandalized by Eddie's drinking and cross-dressing. But she obviously felt no hatred or resentment toward the man because she stayed in contact with him after their marriage had failed miserably. Her role as flight attendant Edith in Plan 9 came after her divorce from Wood. Michael is more of a joke-cracking, knee-slapping wisenheimer who carries a ventriloquist's dummy with him for reasons that are not immediately apparent. It is only on the commentary track that we learn the doll was a gift from Ed Wood.

In all, Crawford John Thomas and Brett Thompson alike were quite pleased with the way The Haunted World turned out and were gratified by the film's warm reception from critics and fans. It got largely kind reviews and currently rates a very respectable 7.2 on the Internet Movie Database. Before the film found a cozy home on DVD, it played at film festivals both in the United States and Europe. The British Film Institute included it in their salute to Edward D. Wood, Jr., and Dolores Fuller took the film to Munich. Perhaps the highlight of The Haunted World's theatrical run was its premiere in Palm Springs, CA, an event which attracted Paul Marco, Vampira, Harry Thomas, Norma McCarty, and more.

It was, Thompson alleges, the largest reunion of "Ed Wood people" of all time. He may well be right. The event is lovingly documented on the DVD, and if you search around on the disc a little, you will find an adorable clip of Norma McCarty and Harry Thomas harmonizing on "Sweet Adeline." This has nothing whatsoever to do with Ed Wood, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Wade Williams gives his stamp of approval.

One person not mentioned aloud in The Haunted World but appearing very prominently in its opening credits is Wade Williams. I talked about Mr. Williams before during my examination of Night of the Ghouls last September. (God, I was so young and naive back then.) In case you've forgotten, here's a brief refresher course on this pivotal and under-documented figure in the posthumous career of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Born in 1942, Wade H. Williams III (not to be confused with the prolific character actor) is a wealthy film producer and exhibitor from Missouri who claims to own the rights to all of Ed Wood's feature films from the 1950s, including Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, along with dozens of other low-budget science-fiction and horror movies of the era made by other directors.

While some (including Rob Craig) have praised Williams for preserving films which might have otherwise disappeared and become unavailable, others (including Ted Newsom) have criticized the distributor for overstepping his legal bounds and making false declarations of ownership of movies that are truly in the public domain. Mr. Williams' own court battles over these films have not always been favorable to him. Here, for instance, is an intriguing legal article about Williams' failed attempt to sue the makers of Good Morning America over the use of clips from Plan 9 and other movies in a story about UFOs.

Is Williams a cinematic savior or a cultural claim jumper? That is not for me to determine. However, I do feel that the absurd and false notion that Ed Wood only directed five films -- an utter canard dutifully repeated by Gregory Walcott in The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. -- largely stems from Wade Williams' attempts to curate Eddie's film catalog and thus control Eddie's public image in the 1990s through DVD releases. Williams wants us to focus only on Ed's work from 1953 to 1959* because that's the era that best fits in with the version of Edward D. Wood, Jr. he wants to sell to the public, i.e. the kooky no-budget auteur with the fuzzy angora sweater and the old-timey director's megaphone.

The Haunted World can be interpreted, then, as Williams' most elaborate effort yet to control the narrative of Ed Wood's life. Wade H. Williams III can take his place in line among Ed Wood's many postmortem spin doctors, including Harry and Michael Medved (The Golden Turkey Awards); Rudolph Grey (Nightmare of Ecstasy); Rob Craig (Ed Wood, Mad Genius); Ted Newsom (Look Back in Angora and Big Box of Wood); and Tim Burton (Ed Wood). Each of these fellows, depending on his predilections and prejudices, gives us his own personal version of Ed Wood. Perhaps the closest we can come to a "real" or "true" Ed Wood is a composite of all the different versions of the director we have been given over the years.

* A footnote here: the clips of Ed Wood's films provided by Wade Williams are unusually scratchy and have a weather-beaten appearance to them. Whether this was a deliberate choice by Brett Thompson, I do not know. Clearer, better prints of these films, especially Plan 9, are readily available to viewers. A bluish tint has also been added to many of these clips, but this effect is not consistent.

Still the Coroner: Meinhardt Raabe at age 86.

The viewing experience: While watching The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., I could not help but flash back to another oddball pop culture documentary, Turner Classic Movies' Memories of Oz (2001).

Ostensibly a factual retelling of the creation of MGM's beloved Technicolor musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), TCM's 30-minute special stands out from all the other Oz docs because of its numerous eccentricities. It's clear that the makers of Memories of Oz wanted this production to stand apart from others of its ilk, such as Jack Haley, Jr.'s reverential The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Fifty Years of Magic (1990). While Haley's documentary is hosted by the venerable and wholesome Angela Lansbury, the most prominent celebrity guest in Memories of Oz is John Waters, director of such distinctly family-unfriendly fare as Pink Flamingos (1972) and Serial Mom (1994). Moreover, Memories displays an especially keen interest in film props, treating these objects with nearly as much care and attention as the human beings who had used them.

Without a doubt, however, the boldest decision made by the producers of Memories of Oz was to have the surviving Munchkins, by then octogenarians and nonagenarians, wear facsimiles of their whimsical, childlike costumes from the 1939 film. It is one thing to have the wizened Meinhardt Raabe, then 86, relate the story of ducklings who were accidentally dyed blue while swimming through the chemically-enhanced water on the Munchkinland set. It is something else to have him do so while wearing the ridiculously oversized, scroll-like hat he'd once donned as the Munchkin Coroner. Raabe could have been photographed while wearing a suit and tie, but someone in the chain of command at TCM felt that his anecdote would be more effective or memorable if he were wearing a costume as he told it. A producer who makes such a choice has, I would argue, left the world of "straight" documentaries and entered into the realm of surrealism.

This approach is not inherently "correct" or "incorrect." It does, however, suggest a level of authorial control that viewers may not expect from a documentary. That same sort of control, the palpable presence of a filmmaker who is micromanaging everything we see, is very much in evidence throughout The Haunted World -- and to a much greater extent than in the comparatively modest Memories of Oz. Viewers may not be comfortable with that degree of artifice in a non-fiction film. I personally was not bothered by it, since fakery is as central to the films of Ed Wood as it is to The Wizard of Oz. Movies paradoxically lie to us in order to convey certain truths. 

Viewers should pay special attention to this film's title and adjust their expectations accordingly. This is not The Haunted Life of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Instead, it's The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. There's a major difference between these two. The first (imaginary) title suggests a systematic or even scholarly biography of an individual filmmaker. The second (actual) title suggests a film that is more atmospheric and nostalgic than encyclopedic. And that's precisely what The Haunted World is.

Watching Brett Thompson's film is akin to taking a leisurely stroll through a curio shop. This is far from a definitive record of Ed Wood's existence on this earth, and it just barely serves as a historical overview of the man's film career. Instead, The Haunted World is more of a mood piece about Hollywood in the 1950s, as viewed through the filter of Ed Wood's career. At his comprehensive fan site, Ed Wood historian Philip R. Fry complains:

The focus is ... unrelentingly on Ed's classic period [of the 1950s]. Although there are shots of some of Ed's novels, and footage is shown from the filming of Orgy of the Dead, (the same footage used in [Ted Newsom's 1994 documentary] Look Back In Angora) there is very little said about [Ed Wood's] work after Plan 9. In fact, with the exception of small mentions of The Sinister Urge and Night of the Ghouls, the film completely ignores the whole of his output post Plan 9. While this approach is acceptable in something as specific as [the 1992 documentary] Flying Saucers [Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion], it is shamefully shortsighted from a film that is supposed to be a full reflection on Ed.

Googie's Diner: an architectural landmark.

But is this film intended as "a full reflection" on Edward D. Wood, Jr.? On the DVD commentary track, director Brett Thompson makes it very clear that his main goal with this film was to document the times in which Eddie lived and worked. Through this movie, Thompson wanted to magically recapture a version of Hollywood that had vanished many years ago. It is the faded glamour of the Ed Wood story which attracted and compelled Thompson, more so than the movies Eddie made.

The director is obviously knowledgeable about the theaters, restaurants, studios, and nightclubs of the past and discusses 1950 architecture with gusto. He spends several minutes on the DVD talking about Googie's Coffee Shop, an influential and stylish Hollywood eatery where Vampira used to hang out with her pals James Dean and Marlon Brando, i.e. the "Googie crowd."

Some of Eddie's old haunts -- such as Quality Studios, where Plan 9 was made, and the offices of Wood-Thomas Productions -- are recreated in this movie in the form of lovely and intricate miniatures, handmade by art director Gregg Lacy. (I'd love to have one of these wondrous dioramas for my own Ed Wood collection!)

Throughout the commentary, Thompson uses phrases like "faux grandeur" and "fake patina" to describe his movie, which is so formal and old-fashioned that it includes an overture, something studio movies had stopped doing decades previously. While he's a marvelous archaeologist of the semi-recent past, Brett Thompson does not strike me as an Ed Wood trivia whiz of the highest order. He struggles to identify Bride of the Monster at one point, for example, and calls that film's octopus a "squid." Furthermore, he does not challenge Bela Lugosi, Jr.'s (totally false) assertion that Ed Wood had a son, and he seems not to know what Final Curtain even was.

Ed's post-Night of the Ghouls career, meaning everything from The Sinister Urge onward, does not interest Thompson in the least, and he seems uncomfortable even discussing it. One of the panel of pop culture historians recruited for the DVD commentary inquires near the end of the track, "I want to know, whatever happened to Ed Wood?" Keep in mind, this man has just watched an entire movie about Ed Wood when he says this.

Solely on the basis of screening The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., a viewer would have very little idea about the arc of Ed Wood's career and life. Thompson shows us the covers of Killer in Drag and Devil Girls, but he does not explain what these books are or when Eddie wrote them. And this is the only allusion to Ed's writing career you'll find in this documentary! Wood's screenwriting gigs of the 1960s and 1970s go entirely unmentioned. Likewise, some behind-the-scenes footage from Orgy of the Dead is included but not labeled in any way, verbally or textually. Orgy's director Stephen C. Apostolof, a key player in Ed Wood's life, is prominently glimpsed here but is unfortunately left anonymous.

The Haunted World breezily skips over entire decades of Eddie's life and pays little heed to the man's nearly quarter-century marriage to Kathy Wood. Why? Because these things aren't part of the story that Brett Thompson wanted to tell with his movie. It's clear that the director of The Haunted World's true passion was for the long-gone Hollywood of the mid-20th-Century, and Ed Wood provided him with a way of covering that world in a way that would be interesting and involving to modern-day viewers. This is less a documentary than it is an exhibition.

Towards the end of The Haunted World, there is a long, wordless montage in which the lights are dimmed on each of the individual witnesses, leaving them in darkness. The impression I got from this is that these folks are items on display in a gallery somewhere, encased in glass, and the security guard has turned out the lights at the end of the day. To borrow a phrase from Pulp Fiction's Vincent Vega (John Travolta), The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. is "a wax museum with a pulse."

In two weeks: "I don't believe in thinking small, so I've got a whole slate of pictures for ya!" So said Johnny Depp when he portrayed Edward D. Wood, Jr. back in 1994. And, verily, Eddie had a "whole slate" of movies he desperately wanted to make during his lifetime but never got to because of little inconveniences like money. His graveyard of unfinished and abandoned projects is more cluttered than that of many directors. 

What can we do to correct this injustice? Well, some filmmakers have taken it upon themselves to finish what Ed Wood started many decades ago. One prominent example is independent movie warrior Andre Perkowski, whose work I have already examined in a previous installment of this series. But I am too intrigued by another Perkowski title to let it slip by me. And that's why the next edition of Ed Wood Wednesdays will be devoted to (you guessed it) The Vampire's Tomb (2013).

One Song at a Time: "I Only Have Eyes for You"

The unique, sophisticated sound of the Flamingos captured my imagination as a teen.

The song: "I Only Have Eyes for You"

Artist: The Flamingos

Released: 1959

This will be a brief one, I promise. I just wanted to write about this song while the mood was still with me. And, yeah, it's another doo-wopper, a tune released only a year before The Passions' "I Only Want You," the song I wrote about yesterday. The titles are almost identical, I admit. If my goal with this feature was to bring you a diverse selection of songs from different genres, so far I'm not doing so hot. But you know what? This is my blog, and I'll write about what I damned well please.

The song "I Only Have Eyes for You" goes back to 1934, and it's been recorded by everyone from hell to breakfast (fuzzy-haired Artie Garfunkel had something of a hit with it in the 1970s), but the only waxing that really counts was the one done by The Flamingos in 1959. You've probably heard their version in a movie or playing on an oldies radio station or something like that, and it's tempting to lump this record in with all the other kitschy '50s detritus, like poodle skirts and hula hoops.

But "I Only Have Eyes for You" stands out from the pack. It's unlike most doo-wop and R&B from the era. It's different from just about everything. The Flamingos took a tune that was already a golden oldie by the time they got their hands on it, and they tore it down to the ground and rebuilt something beautiful and weird from the rubble. To me, the record still sounds like it was recorded tomorrow.

The lead singer really does seem to be in a dreamlike trance, so in love he's unsure of whether or not he's in a garden, and the other singers and musicians sound like they're recording in a different dimension altogether. I get chills every time.

If I can pin the greatness of the record on any one factor, I'd have to say it's one of the simplest things: those repeated piano triplets, what Stan Freberg disparagingly called "that clink clink clink jazz." Never has "clink clink clink" been so mysterious or so lovely.

My official blackmail photo.

"I Only Have Eyes for You" had probably been in the background of my life for years without my really noticing, but I can distinctly remember the very night that this recording became one of my all-time favorites.

It was the early 1990s, let's say '91 or '92, and I was a teenager in high school. In those days, one of the main driving forces in my life was marching band. Yeah, I was one of those kids. I was in it all four years -- halftime shows, pep rallies, those funny faux-military hats with the plumes on top, the Sgt. Pepper-esque tunics. That was my life. Hey, I'm not ashamed of it. Semper fi. 

Anyway, we were a competitive band, which meant that on the weekends during the fall, they'd load us onto school buses and take us to other towns in mid-Michigan for these big outdoor contests (usually called "invitationals"). On these busy Saturdays, we'd go to football stadiums at other schools and do our choreographed eight-minute halftime show. Other bands would do their eight-minute halftime shows, too, usually based around a particular theme or a composer. Along the way, a panel of very serious-looking judges would watch all these groups, rate them in a dizzying variety of nit-picky categories, and hand out trophies at the end of the night. It was all very scientific, I assure you.

These competitions took a long time to complete, as you might guess, and we were often very late getting back to the parking lot of our own high school. It would be cold and dark by then, and the kids who didn't have cars of their own would have their parents waiting to pick them up. (Poor parents! It was past midnight!) While the bus rides to the contests were pretty raucous, the bus rides home were quiet and contemplative. Everyone was pretty much zonked out by then. I can remember just staring out the window at all the traffic lights.

My only entertainment in those primitive days was an AM/FM cassette Walkman. One night, I realized I didn't have enough battery power left to play a tape, so I switched it to the "radio" function. At first, all I could get was static, but suddenly a song coalesced out of the chaos! It was "I Only Have Eyes for You" by The Flamingos, and I was hypnotized by it. It's one of those transcendent experiences you hope to have while listening to music, and I don't know that any record could affect the 38-year-old me the way that song affected the 15- or 16-year old me. Maybe I'm still hoping to replicate that feeling, twenty-plus years later.

One Song at a Time: "I Only Want You"

The Passions, a lesser-known but worthwhile doo-wop group.

The song: "I Only Want You"

Artist: The Passions

Released: 1960

Soundtrack to a college crush.

During all my years of schooling, an era of my life I tried to prolong indefinitely so as to avoid entry into the dreaded "real world," I only ever had one crush on a teacher. 

It was one of my college professors, a woman who taught courses on Spanish literature and culture. If you follow any particular major or minor long enough, you'll eventually have the same profs over and over again, and she was repeatedly one of mine. To maintain propriety, I'll avoid naming her or the institute of higher learning for which she still works. 

Let me cut you off at the pass by pointing out that she wasn't the busty, provocatively-dressed "Hot for Teacher"-type seductress you're likely picturing. No short skirts, plunging necklines, stilettos, or fishnet stockings here. Instead, this professor was a modest, sensibly-dressed brunette with a soft voice and a mildly nerdy vibe. I can never be sure why exactly I developed such a crush on her, but looking at her picture in the college's staff directory still makes my heart flutter to this day. 

Every crush needs a musical soundtrack, I feel, and for this one I chose classic doo-wop, in particular a track from 1960 called "I Only Want You" by The Passions. I discovered it on a Rhino Records compilation and loved it immediately, playing it over and over. AllMusic describes The Passions as "an above-average white doo-wop ensemble from Brooklyn." Apparently, they recorded for a few years, starting in the late 1950s, but never quite made it. 

This particular tune wasn't even one of their bigger hits, but it got my attention anyway. What was it that first caught my fancy? Was it the lopsided drum part, which emphasizes the second and fourth beats of each measure rather than the first and third, sounding like a pirate with a peg-leg running through a steel corridor? Maybe it was the descending pizzicato strings that "answer" the lead singer after every line of the verses? 

Probably it's just the unabashed erotic yearning of the lyrics, i.e. the fact that the guy in the song is just so consumed with lust for some young lady "every waking hour, every minute of the day." This poor dope can't even get a break when he falls asleep: "Even in my dreams, you are there it seems/I can always see your face." It reminds me of a line from Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974): "Real love is erection, not orgasm." That's the essence of "I Only Want You." It's the perfect combination of harmony and hard-on.

This is the second episode of this proposed series. I've changed the title from "Best Song Ever" to "One Song at a Time" to emphasize that this is basically an autobiography in the form of record reviews.

One Song at a Time: "Oliver's Army"

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, circa 1979

The song: "Oliver's Army"

Artist: Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Released: 1979

Typical "Zomby" panel.

This is a pilot of sorts for a potential series. I guess whether it continues depends on what readers think of it and how much I enjoy writing it. Honestly, I feel guilty when too much time builds up between posts. To counteract this, I wanted to come up with something I could write quickly, without a great deal of research or preparation, so that I could have new content here every day or two.

In the past, that function was filled by Zomby, since originally all I had to do to turn Ziggy into a zombie was cut and paste him into Microsoft Paint, select the default shade of light grey from the color palette, and then click on the title character. Bingo! Instant hilarity! Then, the site that provided the black-and-white Ziggy panels I needed started posting grainier, lower-quality scans of the cartoons. Suddenly, I had to manually, painstakingly "paint" Ziggy the proper shade of grey to make him undead. Bogus! Besides, I'd already cycled through most of the potential punchlines with Zomby and wound up doing variations on variations by the end.

So what else could I do on the fly? Well, my iTunes library currently has 17,372 songs in it, so maybe there's some potential material there. Here's the plan for Best Songs Ever: I'll pick one particular track from those 17,372 songs and write a few paragraphs about why I like this song so much. This will be half music criticism and half autobiography, since I'll inevitably wind up writing about how these songs have affected my life. Does that sound good? If so, let's continue.

The Armed Forces LP.

"Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions is a song that must have come to my attention about twenty-five years ago, when I was a terminally-confused teenage weirdo who didn't know anything about anything but thought he knew a great deal about a great deal. Costello's then-recent Spike album, featuring the hit single "Veronica" (a collaboration with Paul McCartney) was a big crossover hit in 1989, the very year I entered high school, and that was probably my gateway into his discography.

I'd seen Costello before that, but I hadn't really paid that much attention. Seeking more, I consulted the encyclopedic Rolling Stone Album Guide for some much-needed album guidance, and that led me to Armed Forces, a 1979 LP Costello recorded with his sometimes-backing band, the Attractions. Rolling Stone didn't steer me wrong, either: Armed Forces is an excellent concept album with a consistent warfare motif, often using militaristic imagery to describe romantic relationships. The songs on the album are propulsive and punchy, with sharp, sardonic lyrics and catchy, indelible melodies.

One track that stuck out from my very first listen was "Oliver's Army," which was actually a big hit over in England, hitting #2 on the singles chart and going gold. Considering the prickly, political lyrics, that's kind of a mind-bender.

The song, not remotely romantic in nature, addresses the issue of England sending its poor, disadvantaged young men (Costello has described them as "mere boys") to fight and die in a variety of foreign hot spots. The "Oliver" of the title is likely Oliver Cromwell, the one-time "Lord Protector" of England, who seized control of the country from reigning monarch King Charles I in a bloody takeover in the mid-1600s. Cromwell's so-called New Model Army, with which he waged civil war in his homeland, is considered the historical forerunner of the modern British military.

The central thesis of Costello's song is that the British government is coldly sending citizens it considers expendable to do its dirty work abroad, a theme encapsulated by this shocking, unsparing couplet: "Only takes one itchy trigger/One more widow, one less white nigger."

How did a song this bleak become a big radio hit? Easy. It's a work of supreme, danceable pop craftsmanship, including a florid piano part Costello admits was swiped directly from ABBA's "Dancing Queen." Listening to "Oliver's Army" on repeat today, I realized how heavily Costello's song shows the influence of Phil Spector's operatic "Wall of Sound" pop and R&B hits of the 1960s. Towards the end of "Oliver's Army," Costello even starts doing the woah oh oh ohs from seemingly every Ronnettes record.

To be honest, when I was 14, I had no idea who Oliver Cromwell was, and I probably couldn't have located most of the places Costello names in the song (Johannesburg, Checkpoint Charlie, etc.) on a map. But any kid sitting through a dull day of high school can relate to this repeated line from the chorus: "And I would rather be anywhere else but here today!"

Okay, folks, that was the pilot. Let me know if you have any interest in seeing this kind of thing on a semi-regular basis.

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

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

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

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 42: 'I Woke Up Early the Day I Died' (1998)

To be Ed-Wood-ically accurate, it should be "shocking facts," not "shocking truth,' but whatever.

"I used to do things, and I'd say things, and Jesus I was evil. Fake things and break things, and Jesus I was evil."

-Darcy Clay (1972-1998)

"One thing he did take was one of the last scripts he wrote, one he really loved, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. And this one angora sweater that he loved so much."

-Kathy Wood (1922-2006)

Tony Bennett's Steppin' Out LP

A funny thing happened in the 1990s, and it was inarguably a boon to the Ed Wood cult. At the height of the "college rock" revolution, many young Americans grew weary of grunge and flannel shirts and started looking to their parents and grandparents for inspiration as they sought an alternative to the alternative. Gone were the scruffy bangs, ripped jeans, and stained baby-doll dresses. People started combing their hair, wearing suits, and drinking martinis again. Hipsters were still raiding the second-hand stores, but now it was to find vintage fedoras and old Les Baxter, Yma Sumac, and Henry Mancini LPs. 

Every cultural movement needs an anthem, and in this case it was Tony Bennett's 1993 remake of the Fred Astaire song "Steppin' Out with My Baby," a tune Bennett reprised the next year on MTV Unplugged. It was a golden age for CD reissues, too, with a whole rainbow of rediscovered non-rock recordings from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s. Suddenly, your music collection wasn't complete without some "grownup" stuff: lounge, exotica, big band, swing, and even film scores.

Old TV shows and movies benefited from the backwards-looking trend, too. Witness director Spike Jonze's wildly popular videos for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" (both from 1994). The former used clips from the TV sitcom Happy Days, thereby invoking both the 1950s and the 1970s simultaneously, while the latter fondly parodied such campy 1970s cop shows as Starsky and Hutch and Baretta. It's important to note that our relationship to mid-20th-century culture was neither entirely worshipful nor entirely sarcastic in the 1990s. It was a mélange. We thought the past was campy and quaint, sure, but we couldn't help but daydream ourselves into a version of America that seemed somehow cooler and classier than the one we knew.

A '90s artifact: the Orgy soundtrack.

Ed Wood was right in the pop cultural sweet spot for all this, so it's not surprising that the second big wave of interest in his career -- following his bump in popularity after The Golden Turkey Awards and It Came from Hollywood in the early 1980s -- would occur during the Clinton years. Edward D.Wood, Jr.'s lifestyle was totally out of step with the 1990s, which paradoxically made him perfect for that decade. Eddie was the Anti-Slacker, the Non-Cobain: a terminally-sincere, whiskey-swilling, pencil-mustached, drug-hating, stuck-in-the-'50s dynamo whose B-movies and cheapo paperbacks clearly reflected the morals and aesthetics of a bygone era.

Perhaps the bohemians of the '90s recognized in Ed Wood a kindred spirit. To the extent that his producers and publishers would allow him, he did it his way. And the many technical and logical shortcomings of his films and books gave these works a personal, homemade feel and distinguished them from the anonymous, assembly-line output of his cinematic and literary contemporaries. Ed may not have been "good" by conventional standards, but he was "different" -- which in the 1990s was maybe even better than "good," at least to a certain segment of the population.

Some of these folks, luckily, were tastemakers with industry connections, and we have them to thank for reissuing some of Ed Wood's films, books, and even music, along with the release of new Wood-inspired works. I'm grateful, for instance, that a tiny independent label called Strangelove Records decided to put out an Orgy of the Dead soundtrack CD in 1995. I doubt that such a release, which I happened to find at the late and much-missed Crow's Nest record store in Crest Hill, IL, would have been feasible at any other time in American history. You could do that kind of stuff back then! As I've made my way through the Ed Wood Wednesdays project, I've come to realize how much I owe to the so-called "lounge revival" of the Nineties.

This week, I am turning my attention to another product from that strange and wondrous decade. It's a full-length, all-star film based on a genuine Ed Wood script. It's quite possible you've never seen or even heard of this flick. And thereby hangs a tale...

I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED (1998)

A catchy title?

Alternate titles: Good golly, does this thing have alternate titles! It began life as a script called The Silent Night or Night of Silence. A later draft of the script was titled I Awoke Early the Day I Died or I Woke Up Early --- The Morning I Died. Additionally, the IMDb lists I Awoke Early the Day I Died as an alternate release title for the finished film*.

It was also marketed as Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. On Brazilian television, it was The Last Day of My Life. Spain had it as I Woke Up Early the Day of My Death. The Hungarian title translates as I Got Up Early the Day I Died. The Venezuelans called it The Last Day of My Life. In Poland, it was known as On the Day of My Death, I Woke Up Early. For German TV, it became Ed Wood's The Day I Died.

The IMDb lists a Japanese title for it, but the best translation I can come up with for it is The Up Early Old Old Man Nuts, which, though hilarious, is probably not accurate. Amazingly, the original promotional web site for the film is still up after 15 years. Move over, Space Jam.

* Not to be confused with David Tahir's I Awoke Early the Day I Died (1997), which is adapted from the same original screenplay by Ed Wood.

Availability: For a variety of reasons which I will explain in the "backstory" section, this film is not legally available for home viewing or theatrical exhibition. It has been widely bootlegged, however, and may be available from third party sellers as a DVD-R.

The backstory: Ed Wood did not hold onto things. It wasn't that he didn't want to; it simply wasn't an option when he was being evicted from houses or apartments by impatient landlords every few years. When he died at the age of 54 in December 1978, Ed and his wife Kathy were living at the house of a generous friend, Peter Coe, in North Hollywood. The only surviving souvenirs of his thirty-year career in show business were the few mementos he could fit into a single suitcase. The rest had been thrown in the trash -- books, film scripts, unpublished manuscripts, the lot. Among the hearty survivors was an idiosyncratic screenplay that Ed had been revising since the early 1960s and finally completed in the mid-1970s.

In its earliest stages, this strange film-to-be was called The Silent Night or Night of Silence, but by 1974 it had morphed into I Awoke Early the Day I Died, the new title reminiscent of that famous opening line from Emily Dickinson's immortal Poem 465. ("I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died.") What made The Day I Died so unusual is that it told its surreal story without the benefit of dialogue. The script focuses on a resourceful madman known only as The Thief who kills a nurse, escapes from a sanitarium by donning her uniform, and then goes on a prolific crime spree, including several brazen acts of robbery and murder, before receiving his grim comeuppance. Much of the storyline centers around the members of a strange Hollywood cult. The Thief mistakenly blames these people for taking a stash of money he had stolen from a loan office. The majority of the running time is devoted to vignettes in which the Thief tracks down the cult members and kills them one by one.

The proposed cast: John Agar, Aldo Ray, and John Carradine.

As with many of his orphaned projects, Ed Wood had a cast in mind for The Day I Died, should he ever secure the funding for it. Veteran actor Aldo Ray, whose voluminous credits include The Green Berets (1969) and We're No Angels (1955), would have played the escaped madman. John Carradine, whom Eddie had also tapped to play the murderous wino Pete in his unrealized short film, To Kill a Saturday Night, was to have played a gravedigger who figures prominently in the plot. Actors David Ward and John Agar, meanwhile, would have played police officers. None of these stalwart performers would have been saddled with memorizing lines, since there were none in the script to memorize. Wood biographer Rudolph Grey suggests that perhaps Eddie was influenced by Robert Rouse's similarly wordless Cold War drama The Thief (1952) with Ray Milland. The fact that the protagonist of The Day I Died is known only as "The Thief" suggests Grey is correct in his supposition.

Keeper of the flame: Bob Blackburn

It is eerily appropriate that a screenplay called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was filmed 20 years after Ed Wood himself died. An honest-to-god finished film of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died finally appeared in theaters in October 1998 and had a spotty release history throughout the next calendar year. (Interestingly, of Ed Wood's hoped-for cast, only David Ward wound up being in the completed movie.) 

Despite some positive pre-release buzz and a cast full of recognizable stars, the film bombed badly. The critical reaction to The Day I Died can charitably be described as baffled hostility. Eventually, for various financial and legal reasons, the film vanished from the marketplace entirely. To this day, it has yet to reach a wide audience.

Nevertheless, bootleggers have given the film a shady afterlife of sorts, and the neglected project has garnered a cult following among die-hard Wood fans, including Philip R. Frey, who maintains the excellent Ed Wood Online site. "I'll admit I was unsure of this one," Frey writes, "but it totally won me over. From the psychedelic opening credits to the end, I liked what I saw." The webmaster concludes his review with a sentiment that might make the film's creators smile and cringe simultaneously: "It is a real pity that more people can't see this one. Hopefully it will be available on home video eventually. Until then, seek out whatever copy you can find." The fact that The Day I Died exists as a real-life movie at all is largely due to the intercession of two men named Bob, neither of whose names actually appear in the film's credits.

The first of these is Hollywood resident Bob Blackburn, who put in sixteen busy years as a music and promotions director for the Westwood One and Dial Global radio networks and is currently self-employed as the head of his own sound design firm. Blackburn, the son of a legendary Seattle SuperSonics announcer, became a friend of the late Kathy Wood in the autumn years of her life; he has worked diligently ever since to get Ed's movies and books back in front of the public eye. It is Bob, for instance, who acts as the administrator of the excellent Edward D. Wood, Jr. Facebook page, which is the closest thing Eddie has to an official presence on the social network. Lately, Bob's been working to make Rick Tell's Ed Wood: The Musical! a reality. 

And it was also Bob, still the most passionate Ed Wood advocate on the planet, who put me in touch with a couple of key behind-the-scenes players in the gnarly saga of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Eventually, through a few spirited rounds of phone-tag and e-mail-tag, I was able to contact these individuals and find out what they know about the production.

EYEWITNESS #1:

BOB WEINBERG (attorney)
interviewed 6/20/2014

NOTE: It had been my intention to bring you a recent phone interview I conducted with Bob Weinberg, an entertainment attorney who represented Kathy Wood in the 1990s. The original version of this article included at this juncture a description of my friendly, informative one-hour chat with Bob. After exchanging a few more e-mails with Bob once the article was posted, however, I have decided to remove this conversation from the piece entirely due to legal considerations. In its place, here is a statement from Mr. Weinberg regarding his involvement with Kathy Wood:

Ed Wood's widow, Kathy.

I met Bob Blackburn and Kathy Wood in 1993. Bob had been searching for an entertainment lawyer to help Kathy in connection with a Tim Burton film that was rumored to be in development then about her late husband Ed Wood, and Bob found me through a mutual friend who was a film editor. On the first day I met Kathy, I found her to be petite, friendly, warm and appreciative, and it was obvious that she had a great desire to make Ed’s unfulfilled dreams come true. On that first day, she mentioned an unproduced Ed Wood film script called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, and how much she would like to see it made. In the following years, Kathy, Bob and I shared some wonderful memories, like seeing Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic come to the screen. We struggled without much luck, however, with our plan to get I Woke Up Early the Day I Died produced, until we had the good fortune to meet Aris Iliopulos and Chris Hanley, who were both enthusiastic about the project from the start. 

A short time later I arranged for Kathy Wood to option the script to Aris, and he and Chris began to line up the astounding cast who ended in the film. Many months later, I remember getting a phone message from Aris about how excited Christina Ricci was to appear in the film, and Kathy and I began to get excited, thinking that the film might really get made. Some months after that, the film was set for production and Aris was gracious enough to give Kathy a minor role in the film, something which meant a lot to Kathy. She was especially excited to share a scene with Billy Zane, the film’s leading character, though she was also nervous about performing. I visited the set and was thrilled to see the terrific group of actors who were working on the film and seemingly having a very fun time of it. I remember meeting John Ritter on the set and I let him know how much it meant to Kathy that he was working on this project. 

Not too much time went by before Bob Blackburn, Kathy and I found ourselves watching a screening of the film at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was a dream come true for Kathy and her friends, and while this hard-charging action film with a loud rock and roll soundtrack felt different in tone from the story we had read on paper in script form, Kathy liked the energy of the film, loved how true it was to the storyline of the script, and was amazed that it had actually been made and included such a large and stellar cast. Kathy died about eight years after I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was shot, but getting this film produced, being in the film, and seeing it in a famous Hollywood Boulevard movie theater remained as some of Kathy Wood’s favorite experiences in the 13 years I was honored to know and work for her.

Thank you for that warm reminiscence, Bob. While I was deeply saddened to lose the interview, I'm glad that  Mr. Weinberg took the time to provide the preceding statement. I'm also grateful that the attorney put me in touch with the director of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, Aris Iliopulos. My conversation with him follows.

EYEWITNESS #2:

ARIS ILIOPULOS (artist/director)

interviewed 6/23/2014

Director Aris with Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and Karen Black at the film's premiere. (Photo courtesy Aris Iliopulos)

Talking at length to Aris Iliopulos, a fiercely independent Greek-born artist and occasional filmmaker, is the conversational equivalent of watching a pot of water come to a boil on the stove. Though his English syntax is slightly labored and artificial, rather like that of Bela Lugosi, the man's brain is positively bubbling with a dozen different ideas at once, all of which he sincerely wants to convey to his listener. "I'm talking too much," he half-apologetically says at more than one juncture during our 90-minute summit. I neither agree nor disagree, since I'm just desperately trying to keep up as I take notes with a stubby pencil on a yellow legal pad.

What I knew about Aris in advance, apart from what Bob Weinberg had told me, came from an interview the director had done at the time of the film's original release with entertainment journalist Daniel A. Dickholtz. Bob Blackburn had helpfully forwarded this piece to me, though he couldn't recall its exact source. The gaudy typeface and blood-soaked layout, along with the "F #186" watermark in the corner, leads me to believe it appeared in Fangoria under the name "What a Drag" in September 1999. The closest listing I can find, however, is one at the Texas A&M website, which says that the title was "Silent Stalker" and that it appeared in Fangoria's sci-fi themed sister publication, Starlog, in issue #268 from November 1999. Believe what you must.

Dickholtz's approaches the movie rather warily, and I feel he slightly misrepresents the Wood cult as a blinkered and delusional apologists who can see no wrong in their hero. Nevertheless, the article successfully conveys the almost childlike enthusiasm Iliopulos brought to I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Here, for your browsing pleasure, is that article in its entirety:

Click on the images above to see the pages full-sized.

As you might expect, Dickholtz focused much of his attention on the film's extremely eclectic and high-profile cast. Besides the always-dapper Billy Zane, who was then coming off his memorable role as a heel in James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic (1998), the cast of The Day I Died included a dizzying variety of film stars (Tippi Hedren, Bud Cort, Christina Ricci); television stars (Jonathan Taylor Thomas, John Ritter, Rick Schroder, Steven Weber); comedians and performance artists (Dana Gould, Sandra Bernhard, Taylor Negron, Ann Magnuson); Ed Wood associates (Vampira, Conrad Brooks, David Ward, Kathy Wood); and a whole host of unclassifiable showbiz legends of every description (ranging from Eartha Kitt and Karen Black to Tara Reid and Nicollette Sheridan).

According to the story, Billy was more than just the film's top-billed star; he also offered visual and music suggestions and even claimed a producer credit. He and Iliopulos were creatively simpatico, even though the director's original choice for the leading role was rock singer Iggy Pop! Also given some attention in the piece were the film's relatively paltry budget -- tactfully not specified but described by the director as "one of the smallest budgets ever" -- and very tight shooting schedule, which supposedly only lasted 20 days, all during August 1998. 

The magazine article is peppered with references to Aris Iliopulos' heroes in the world of art, theater, and cinema, including Federico Fellini, Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Bertolt Brecht. Aris thought of Ed Wood as an avant garde filmmaker and classified him alongside these other iconoclasts and innovators. While Iliopulos told Dickholtz he did not consciously imitate Ed Wood's visual style, he reasoned that he and Ed faced some of the same problems because of limited time and money.

Although it begins in an almost adversarial manner, Dickholtz's article eventually conveys a tone of extremely cautious quasi-optimism about all of this befuddling data. But the theatrical life of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died turned out to be a brief and troubled one, marked by grouchy reviews and nonexistent box office receipts. Had these sad circumstances, along with the sixteen intervening years, cooled Aris Iliopulos' ardor for the project? Not at all, as I was soon to find out.

Highlights from my 90-minute confab with Aris Iliopulos:

Excerpt from a 1998 film
festival catalog from AFI.

• These days, although he's frequently out of the country, Aris makes his home in New York City and is amused by the ridiculous obscurity of his one-and-only mainstream movie. "It's so Ed Wood, the whole thing!" He can't help but giggle as he remembers that the film's distributors went bankrupt just one day after the movie's NYC premiere. He has no residual bitterness about any of his experiences surrounding I Woke Up Early the Day I Died and is incredibly complimentary about everyone involved in the project. It's easy to see why Bob Weinberg described him as such a charmer.

• He takes some satisfaction in the fact that the film has played successfully in foreign countries, even though its shelf life in America was fleeting. "It's really big in Germany," he insists. Later in our talk, he says that "the Germans have a copy [of the film] in some refrigerator. They love Ed Wood there." He also mentions that the film has played well in both Japan and the Netherlands.

• Aris had been a fan of Ed Wood for many years before directing this film. He'd seen three of Eddie's movies (probably Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9) on PBS and been blown away by them. As he does in the Dickholtz article, the director makes frequent references to all his art-film heroes throughout our conversation. It's easy to see that Federico Fellini is to Aris Iliopulos what Orson Welles was to Ed Wood. 

• How did he, a first-time director, get to helm this project? Iliopulos attributes this to being at the right place at the right time. He went to lunch, he says, with "the Ed Wood people" one day in Los Angeles when Kathy Wood and the two Bobs were searching for a director. He read the script and was so taken with it that he made an "illegal" Xeroxed copy of it. "It was really me!" he enthuses.

• He and Kathy Wood got along well right from the start. "She's a jewel," he remembers. He refers to her both as his "muse" and "like a mother." She even gave him one of Eddie's rings to wear while making the movie. Kathy's uppermost concern was that the director not "bastardize" the script by adding dialogue. He didn't do this, even though he was tempted, because he promised to protect the integrity of Ed Wood's vision. "I saw it as an art piece," he explains. "I gave Kathy a big promise not to put in dialogue." Aris' own background is in the theater and in art films, and his movie idols are underground directors like Kenneth Anger.

• Christina Ricci, who had worked for producer Chris Hanley on Buffalo '66, was among the very first stars who signed on for the project. Aris was very impressed by Ricci, whom he repeatedly referred to as "amazing." Her performance in The Day I Died, he says, goes beyond mere acting and becomes more like "channeling." He's quick to point out, however, that he doesn't believe in ghosts.

• Iliopulos went to the Sundance film festival to generate interest in the project. He remembers the experience as being "hard" because the festival attendees were very skeptical about the prospect of a dialogue-free movie. In order to sweet talk celebrities into appearing in the film, the director literally wined and dined them by taking them to dinner.

• The pivotal moment in the film's pre-production stage came unexpectedly one day when Aris was visiting a friend's house. "The phone rang," the director remembers, "and it was Billy [Zane]." The actor originally asked Iliopulos to come down to Mexico to discuss the project. Since this wasn't possible, Zane instead came to Los Angeles to meet with Aris. There, the two discussed ways of doing the project and eventually settled on an approach that was heavily influenced by the commedia dell'arte, a form of theater which dates back to 16th century Rome. Of Zane's performance in the movie, Aris states: "There's a duality between being a human and being this crazy person."

• The director doesn't see The Day I Died as a silent movie but rather as a movie without dialogue. Aris was very taken with Ed Wood's typewritten, vodka-stained script, which explains his decision to include excerpts from the original document in the film as onscreen captions. "Let's put a typewriter there!" he says.

• Once Billy Zane got involved, word about the project spread fast in Hollywood. That's when other actors, including Karen Black, signed on. "Karen was a force of nature," Aris gushes. For her one big closeup, the director says, Karen Black was remembering an incident when she looked at a young man who was going to Vietnam and, in all probability, wasn't coming back home alive. Still today, Aris looks back with fondness at a series of "wonderful lunches" he had with Black.

• Aris was also very impressed with Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, who "didn't need any direction." As for the striking appearance of her scene, which was expanded somewhat from the original screenplay, the director says that this sequence shows the imprint of another prominent filmmaker. "That's my Fellini influence!" During filming, Vampira spoke of her affair with James Dean and presented Aris with a copy of Ed Wood's unfilmed script from the 1950s, The Ghoul Goes West, which he still very much wants to make into a movie even though "that screenplay needs work." A big part of his attraction to the project: "I really love Westerns!" As for casting ideas, he thinks Lady Gaga would be good in the film because "there's a lot of performances onstage."

Tippi Hedren with Aris. (Photo courtesy Aris Iliopulos)

• Regarding Tippi Hedren, Aris was able to confirm an amusing anecdote from the Dickholtz interview. On the day she was filming her death scene in San Pedro, CA, a whole flock of birds suddenly appeared behind her. While the director was amazed, the actress was nonplussed. "That happens all the time when I'm on the set," said the one-time star of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Viewers may notice that Tippi's big scene feels like a Hitchcock homage or parody. That was totally intentional, says Aris, who asserts that Eddie would have done the same thing. 

• Iliopulos is diplomatic when I bring up the topic of the film's icy critical reception. He says that the film inspires either love or hate from viewers, which is true to my experience. He seems to feel that the press unfairly categorized him as a pretentious intellectual. "People think I'm some kind of pompous artist," he muses. "I really don't take that very seriously." For the record, he rejects the idea that the film is too cerebral. "It's made more from the stomach than the brain," he insists.

• After the film was completed, the director traveled around with it from country to country on a promotional tour. But he did so at his own expense and had to stop when he arrived in Cuba and realized his bank account was down to $200. Had he had the money to do so, he would have liked to screen a version of The Day I Died in which the film itself is truly silent and the music is all provided by live musicians. Barring that, he'd like to stage a showing of the film at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, where Kathy Wood is "resting."

• One of Aris' greatest triumphs is that his movie played at the world-famous Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. "Eddie would walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard," Aris explains, "and he always wanted to have a screening at Mann's Chinese." After the movie played there, he says, Kathy Wood was in tears -- something which meant more to him than any review.

• Sandra Bernhard's attitude, the director says, was "I don't give a damn." She was very comfortable with her scene in which she dances in only pasties and a g-string; she would gladly have appeared nude had the director requested it. The only problem he encountered with Sandra was that she was unhappy with the "burlesque music" the director provided on the set and profanely demanded some "goddamned real music" in its place. Aris honored her request. "She was dancing to heavy metal," he remembers. Her scene, by the way, was filmed at the Ambassador Hotel, the site of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. "It was a little bit too much," he muses.

• Recently, Aris has been writing a prequel to the film, speculating what may have been happening to Billy Zane's character and to the cultists before the events shown in The Day I Died. He says he only has "forty pages" as of now, but this doesn't worry him because Fellini used to start making a movie with only 35 pages ready to go. The director has been doing quite a bit of writing lately and has even sold some screenplays. "Eddie taught me how to write," he says with pride. The director enjoys this new role, even though he's "a very visual person." Aris declares his love for "good dialogue" and said that he sometimes gets "bored with life" because real people don't always have great lines like movie characters do.

• The film's general lack of close-ups is a deliberate artistic decision by the director. In general, he explains, his favorite films are "movies I can see more than once because I don't know what happens next." He tried to make The Day I Died a film like that. Among the films he likes best are Lawrence of Arabia (which he watches "twice a year"), plus the works of Quentin Tarantino and Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar-winning Italian film La grande bellezza (2013).

• Mostly, Aris does not dwell on the past a great deal. "You move on with your life," he says. It's more important for him to concentrate on "what makes you happy as an artist." For him, that means more traveling and painting these days. "I'm happiest when I travel."

• Still to this day, Iliopulos is wary of Hollywood and the mainstream media, presumably because of his experience in the movie biz. "For a long time," he says, "I would not give interviews." As for his impressions of Tinsel Town, he says, "The backstabbing is a bit too much." 

• How did Eartha Kitt wind up in this movie? Well, Aris says, he approached her at a party and struck up a conversation. She said she had already been in an Ed Wood movie without really being in an Ed Wood movie! And how is this possible? In Plan 9 from Outer Space, Aris reports, you can see Eartha's name on a marquee! Poignantly, The Day I Died proved to be Eartha's farewell film.

• Iliopulos also spoke a bit about the film's original distributor, Cinequanon Pictures International. "Their bite was a little bit bigger than what they could chew," he insists, even though they were "very passionate" about the movie. 

• As you might guess for a star-studded film of this nature, "the set was like a nice party," even though the crew occasionally had to work all day and all night. While he was rushed and didn't have time to do everything he might have liked, Aris estimates he accomplished 90% of what he wanted.

• These days, Aris is mostly a photographer, artist, and world traveler. One of his art projects involved creating an "alter ego" that he would follow around. Another involved photographing African tribesmen. 

Billy Zane and his "mood suit."

• When I bring up the suit Billy Zane wears in the film, Aris takes the opportunity to effusively praise costume designer Mari An-Ceo for her tireless creativity, even though she went over budget. Aris and Mari worked together to make sure that the film's setting was deliberately vague, since Ed Wood's 1950s movies have a timeless quality to them. Aris asserts that the events in The Day I Died could be happening in the 1960s, the 1970s, or the 1990s. "It's all confusing!" he exclaims. Aris also informs me that Zane's character, The Thief, has three different suits and four shirts that he wears at different times in the movie. Why? "When he's really angry," the director explains, "I put him in a tight suit." And the shirts? Well, those change color, depending on the Thief's mood. Aris asks me if I noticed this, and I admit that I didn't... though it's possible this is because I was watching the film as a tiny YouTube video. "It's slight," responds the director, who says that this is another reason why the movie needs to be seen on the big screen.

• Being a fan of Bud Cort's work in Harold & Maude, Nashville, The Life Aquatic, Brewster McCloud, and many other films, I simply had to ask Aris what it was like to work with this beloved character actor, who for some arcane reason is billed as "Lord Heinrich 'Binky' Alcoa III" in the opening titles. "Bud was very professional," Aris remembers with characteristic fondness. Like many of the performers in this film, Cort apparently had a lot of ideas for his scenes. The actor also insisted on playing dual roles. Besides his main scene as the Franklin Pangborn-esque owner of a thrift store from which Billy Zane steals a pair of shoes, Bud also appears in drag as a Spanish senorita during the film's big carnival scene. The thrift shop, by the way, was a real establishment located directly across from Aris' hotel room and on the same block as the film's production office. The director describes it as "so fake it looks like a set."

• In case you were wondering: Yes, there is a director's cut of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. "I saved my first edit," says Aris. "Thank God." What was different about his original assemblage? "It was a more depressing movie," he says. Given that nearly every single character in The Day I Died is killed off, it's difficult to imagine a bleaker version of this film. Nevertheless, it's there in the director's personal collection, waiting to be unleashed.

• Perhaps the weirdest and most gratifying experience Aris Iliopulos had because of this movie was meeting Dolores Fuller, Ed's one-time girlfriend and the female lead in Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait. On one memorable occasion, Dolores brought over the famous pink angora sweater she'd once worn in Glenda, and together, she and Aris re-enacted the film's notorious climax. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall that day.

John Ritter and Karen Black

The viewing experience: Simultaneously bewitching, bothersome, and bewildering, Aris Iliopulos' I Woke Up Early the Day I Died is a film unlike any I have previously witnessed. The film shows the unmistakable earmarks of the Edward D. Wood, Jr. canon, yet it is tonally dissimilar to the kinds of movies Eddie made in the 1950s. It announces its rebellious otherness during the opening credits with a blast of angry, in-your face punk rock called "Jesus I Was Evil" by the late Darcy Clay. The Day I Died is actually dedicated to Clay, a New Zealander who tragically committed suicide mere months before the film debuted. In truth, according to those who knew him well, Eddie hated rock music; his idea of a good tune was "Amazing Grace."

Interestingly, both "Jesus I Was Evil" and "Amazing Grace" are about contrite sinners who have seen the errors of their ways. But "Grace" is manifestly humble and sincere, while "Jesus" seems defiant and sardonic. Clay spits and snarls the lyrics like he's itching for a fight. Because of factors like this, I'm not sure what Eddie would have thought of Aris Iliopulos' film, which sometimes feels like a cross between a very long music video and an extremely chic high-fashion photo shoot.

Ultimately, this is not Eddie's movie. It's Aris' movie. Aris says he would have loved to have seen Eddie's version of The Day I Died, and so would I. But this isn't possible. Eddie's long gone, and we have to learn to appreciate the movie that does exist rather than the one that should exist. Frankly, this was easier than I was expecting. Though it took me a while to adjust to the hip, artsy, punky feel of the 1998 film, by about the 20-minute mark, I was eager to see what would happen next. As a serious Ed Wood-ologist, meanwhile, I couldn't help but notice each of the classic Woodian motifs on display here. An alphabetical inventory might include: alcohol, bums, cemeteries, circuses, cowboys, crime, cults, funerals, gravediggers, hospitals, insanity, murder, nighttime, strippers, theft, and transvestism. They're all here, and photographed so strikingly!

Tellingly, though The Thief is only in drag for a few minutes in the film itself, the image of Zane in the blonde wig and nurse's uniform was used prominently in the marketing materials simply because Ed Wood is so closely associated with cross-dressing. The Thief's daring escape from the sanitarium, by the way, is very similar to a scene in Ed Wood's 1967 novel Devil Girls. And John Ritter's character, a villainous Western star performing at a carnival sideshow, is clearly inspired by Ed's good friend Kenne Duncan. It's just odd to think of Ritter, with his round, friendly face and kind eyes, playing a part inspired by the gaunt and severe-looking Duncan. Perhaps my favorite sequence, visually speaking, is the one with seven-foot-tall Carel Struycken, best known as Lurch in the '90s Addams Family movies, as a sinister undertaker who chases after Billy Zane after the latter breaks into a mortuary. It is here that Iliopulos' background in art and photography really pays off, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

Carel "Lurch" Struycken as an undertaker in I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.

Having been cloistered in the world of Edward D. Wood, Jr. for months on end and thus lacking any objectivity whatsoever, I wanted to get a fresh perspective on this particular motion picture. So I turned to one of the Internet's brightest lights, Ms. Emily Intravia of The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense and The Feminine Critique, for a review of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. I specifically instructed her to watch the movie "cold" with no advance research or preparation. I will now turn the article over to her. 

I WOKE UP EARLY THE DAY I DIED

reviewed by Emily Intravia

Eartha Kitt in The Day I Died.

An Eartha Kitt musical performance. Men wearing mesh t-shirts with stylishly solid short sleeves. Mark Boone Junior revealing what his face looks like sans facial hair. And, ladies, Billy Zane. 

Billy Zane, Billy Zane, and a whole lot of Billy Zane. 

I Woke Up Early the Day I Died has a lot going for it -- ample connections to improve your Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-ing, for one. But whereas your fearless leader Joe will undoubtedly wax wonders on how the film opens a window into the mind of Ed Wood, I’d like to use this space to point out just what an interesting physical actor a certain end-of-the-alphabet B-lister really is. 

Essentially a silent film, I Woke Up Early the Day I Died makes fine use of Zane, something I so rarely get to say in my fandom. As an escaped mental patient-turned-bank robber and murderer credited as "The Thief," he carries the experimental story with a truly unique and more importantly, committed charisma. Based on the indie nature of the film, I imagine most of the cameo-ing cast took part as a quick favor or to satisfy some curiosity in between what must have been better-paying projects. Random powerhouses like Karen Black, Tippi Hedren, Ron Perlman, and for complete trivia fun, Jonathan Taylor Thomas must have had some fun, but as Zane occupies virtually every scene, that dude had to work. 

I did not enter I Woke Up Early the Day I Died with much information, although I was able to piece together the experiment fairly quickly: director Aris Iliopulos has adapted an unfilmed screenplay by the late Ed Wood. Using an eclectic assortment of Hollywood and underground actors, a (what I’m guessing to be) small amount of money, and extremely hard-working sound design, Iliopulos has produced one strange little journey. 

I say that with true affection: I enjoyed this movie. While the novelty did wear off at a certain point, the ambition of the project remained admirable and throughout the (sometimes literal) running time, Billy Zane remained inherently watchable. The film had a certain Bad Boy Bubby-ness to it with a little more screwball comedy tossed in for good measure. In the end, I don’t necessarily know what it says about cinema -- a second watch with better note taking would be necessary for such a grand thesis -- but I certainly endorse its existence in the name of risk-taking filmmaking and Billy Zane celebration.

Thank you, Emily, for that independent and objective critical assessment. 

***

Before I dismiss this class, I'd like to take you all back to those halcyon days of the late 1990s and show you the original theatrical trailer for I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Listen closely and you will discern that much (perhaps all) of the music is cribbed from Howard Shore's indelible score for the Tim Burton film Ed Wood from 1994:

The soundtrack album.

It's important to point out here that movie trailers frequently borrow music from other films simply because they are assembled before the real movie has been completed. It's not laziness or thievery, just practicality. The completed version of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died has plenty of music of its own. Besides the aforementioned "Jesus I Was Evil" by Darcy Clay, the soundtrack also incorporates some golden oldies by jazz greats like Nat "King" Cole ("Nature Boy") and Jack Teagarden ("Puttin' and Takin'"). These are artists with whom Ed Wood would have been much more familiar, so their music fits in very well in his world.

Beyond that, though, the film boasts an excellent and evocative original score by Larry Groupe. Producer/star Billy Zane describes Groupe's music for the film as "ambient hymns [which] create a melodic melting pot both scary and funny, sad and ironic, connecting you directly to the splintered psychology of 'The Thief.'" For those parties who are interested in such things, Mr. Groupe sells the soundtrack for a mere ten bucks directly from his personal website. I think I'll have to purchase this little item myself, if only to provide the perfect musical accompaniment for those crazy nights when I put on my fanciest duds and go prowling the lonely streets with vengeance on my mind.

In two weeks: Did you know that we are rapidly approaching the one-year anniversary of Ed Wood Wednesdays? As originally planned, this series was supposed to have ended after three months. THREE MONTHS! What the hell have I gotten myself into? 

In the spirit of settling old scores and righting old wrongs, I have decided that the next film on the docket shall be a well-known feature documentary about Ed Wood which I have not yet reviewed as part of this series, even though it was pictured prominently in the very first entry way back in July 2013. Go back to that article, and you'll see it nestled comfortably between Orgy of the Dead and Glen or Glenda? among the DVDs I had lined up for review. How naive I was back then! How little I knew of the world! 

Anyway, you make sure and get yourself right back here in two weeks when I finally, finally cover The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1995).