The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 17: My own personal cutting room floor

Not everything makes it onto this blog... until today, that is.

Jack Haley would scoff when people told him that being in The Wizard of Oz (1939) must've been "fun." He knew better. Wearing a stiff, stifling Tin Man costume under those hot MGM studio lights for hours at a stretch? That was no fun. That was work. "I couldn't even sit in it," he told writer Aljean Harmetz. "I could only lean against a reclining board." Haley did have moments of levity on the Oz set, especially while working with his longtime pal Bert Lahr, but making the beloved children's fantasy film was mostly a grueling experience for the actor.

Jack Haley, not having fun.

I've sometimes felt like Jack Haley while working on this Ed Wood series over the course of the last nine years. At least Mr. Haley was paid for his labors. This has been entirely a labor of love for me. I've put in many hours of work, much of it tedious, and literally given away the results for free. I'm not even sure what has compelled me to keep going with this series—a desire to create something, I guess. But didn't I make some royalties off that Steve Apostolof book a couple of years ago? Yeah, just about enough to buy some laundry tokens. There's simply no money in this particular corner of film scholarship.

Sometimes, I have been less than gracious when fielding complaints or corrections from readers. I'm not proud of that, but I can't help it. There's one guy in particular—a self-styled "Hollywood historian" who frequents an Ed Wood group on Facebook—who always seems to have something negative to say about my work and who has been skeptical of every theory I have ever posited about Ed Wood. I suppose I should be grateful that he bothers to read my stuff at all and form an opinion about it, but mostly I just want him to come down with a mild case of bubonic plague. I thought adding a "big fat disclaimer" to the Ed Wood Wednesdays index page would silence the complainers, including my "historian" nemesis. It didn't. My message to them all remains the same: if you think you can do better, you probably can and should.

Greg Dziawer started contributing material to this series in 2015, and I'm very grateful for the amazing stuff he consistently manages to find, but that doesn't mean I work any less work on this blog. The formatting and copy-editing? That's still all me. Sometimes, Greg will send me a whole passel of pictures (many of which I have to censor) with only a skeletal outline of the text he wants to accompany them. It's up to me to put all that material into some kind of readable, coherent article.

Occasionally, Greg will tell me he's working on a particular article, so I'll start making a header image for it in advance. Here's an unused one for a piece he was writing about Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West, aka "The Hubba Hubba Girl," a legendary burlesque dancer who can be seen in the so-called "director's cut" of Jail Bait (1954). The article never materialized, but I didn't want the header to go to waste.

Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West.

More controversially, Greg wanted to look into the career of Cotton Watts, the blackface performer whose extremely offensive and demeaning act can be seen in Jail Bait. Coincidentally, in that director's cut I mentioned earlier, the Evelyn West footage replaces the Cotton Watts footage. Here's the header I devised. It's meant to shock and provoke. That orange "Cotton Watts" logo is supposed to be reminiscent of Looney Tunes, by the way.

The notorious Cotton Watts.

Yet another unrealized Dziawer article was about Kent and the Candidates, the late 1960s/early 1970s rock group that contributed the theme song to Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970). I must have been really enthusiastic for this one, because I created multiple header images featuring the group's leader, Kent Sprague aka Kent Dubarri aka Butch Dubarri. Here's the one I probably would have used.

Kent Sprague of Kent and the Candidates.

And here's an alternate version, in case I wanted something more stylized/cartoony. Looks like I never got around to adding text to this one. Or maybe I was waiting for Greg to write the article, so I could put the title in that big blue space.

More of Kent Sprague.

Not all of my unused header images are for unfinished or unwritten articles. Sometimes, I'll just have a change of heart in the middle of the process and go in a different direction. Below, for instance, is some scrapped artwork for an episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. You can see the image I actually used right here.

Greg Dziawer lurking in the shadows.

And, just for fun, here's some unused artwork I made for an article in Greg's "Magazine Orbit" series. I'm not sure why I created it in the first place or why I never used it. All I know is that I found it on my computer while doing research for this article and decided to present it to you. As with the Kent Sprague picture, I probably would have put some text in that big blue expanse.

Two gentlemen featured in Boy Friends magazine. Where are they now?

So that's it. Essentially, with this article, I wanted to clean house a little and give you some insight into how this blog is made. I realize this might all be self-indulgent, but what are the holidays for if we can't indulge ourselves a little from time to time? You're still free to send corrections and complaints to me, but maybe think about Jack Haley and his reclining board before you do.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 16: The cutting room floor

There's no lonelier place in cinema.

When filmmakers use the term "shooting ratio," they don't mean the aspect ratio of the movie they're making. Instead, they're talking about the amount of footage they shot versus the amount that actually wound up in the finished movie. For example, director George Miller shot 480 hours of footage for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which ended up running two hours when it finally hit theaters. That's a 240:1 shooting ratio, which is extreme even for a high-budget picture. To put that in perspective, the ratio for Francis Ford Coppola's notoriously troubled Apocalypse Now (1979) was 95:1. High but not Fury Road high.

What do you think Ed Wood's shooting ratios were? Well, we actually have some evidence to work with here. Ed's Take It Out in Trade (1970) runs about 80 minutes. Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes (1995) runs about 69 minutes. Assuming every scrap of unused footage wound up in the outtake reel, that's 149 total minutes of film and a shooting ratio of 1.8:1. But let's be generous and round that up to 2:1. For projects like the Swedish Erotica loops, Ed's ratio was probably more like 1:1, meaning everything that was shot made the final cut.

Come to think of it, there's one more still-existent Ed Wood outtake reel that I know of: the one for his 1951 made-for-TV short, The Sun was Setting. The reel runs about seven minutes and change. The finished film itself is 13 and a half minutes. Altogether, that's 21 minutes of footage and a very economical 1.5:1 shooting ratio. Notice that, just like with the TIOIT outtakes, these are either alternate takes or little scraps from the beginnings and ends of scenes. There are no missing or deleted sequences visible here.

There's a reason we don't have a treasure trove of extra scenes from Ed Wood's movies: Eddie couldn't afford to film anything that wasn't going to be used in the final cut. Hell, he had to pad his movies with stock footage just to get them to feature length. Every scrap of celluloid was precious to him. If you wonder why Ed left so many bloopers in his movies—boom mics dipping into frame, actors flubbing lines, etc.—there's your answer. In a way, it lends an air of realism to his films, as acknowledged in this classic scene from Ed Wood (1994).

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 15: Ed Wood en español

FUN FACT: In Spanish, Ed Wood is known as Eduardo Madera.

You might not believe this, but I used to be a Spanish teacher in a former life. Don't ask me to speak any of the language; what little I knew, I've long since forgotten. But I did take a few Spanish courses in college and memorized just enough to teach (uninterested, borderline hostile) middle schoolers some basic vocabulary words and common phrases. Beyond that, I was hopeless. The smarter kids in my classes must've known I was bluffing.

I don't have any nostalgia for my brief, benighted teaching career, but I do have some fond memories of those college courses. That must have been what possessed me to buy a set of Mexican lobby cards for Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) at auction a few years ago. I never did anything with those cards, by the way. They arrived in a large binder in 2015, and they're still in that binder now. Just a dumb, regrettable purchase all around.

I got to thinking recently about Eddie's movies playing in foreign countries, particularly Spanish-speaking ones. South of the border, down Mexico way, Plan 9 was known as Espectros del Espacio and was distributed by a company called Peliculas Coloso S.A. de C.V. (That name translates roughly as Colossus Films, Stock Corporation.) As far as I can tell, this was the company's only release. Or the only one people still remember. I'll have to assume Plan 9 was dubbed into Spanish back then, so that version of the film must exist somewhere. I'd be curious to hear what voice they gave Tor Johnson. Or Bunny Breckinridge. 

In 1961, Eddie's debut film, Glen or Glenda, was released in Argentina under the name Yo Cambiè Mi Sexo. I managed to find two versions of the poster: one with its own unique artwork and one that used the artwork from the American poster. I can't decide which one I like better.

Two Argentinian posters for Glen or Glenda.

I can't let you go today before showing you yet another Argentinian poster, seemingly from the 1960s as well. This time around, Glenda was part of a triple feature alongside the infamous exploitation classic Mom & Dad (1945) and the Finnish drama Bewildered Youth (1957), billed as El Origen de la Natalidad and El Tercer Sexo respectively.

A strange night at the movies in Argentina.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 14: Millionaire's Heiress of the Month, May 1966

Fawn Silver aka Fawn Silverton aka Fanya Carter in Millionaire.

Hugh Hefner really struck on a magic formula when he launched Playboy in 1953. Obviously, the main selling point was sex. But Hef's notorious magazine didn't just offer sex. It offered sex with class and style. Through its regular column, "The Playboy Philosophy," and other articles, the magazine espoused an entire lifestyle that included good wine, expensive stereo equipment, hip jazz, and sharp clothing. This was porn with a veneer of dignity. Hef wanted only the best for Playboy—the best looking women, the best writers, the best photographers, the best cartoonists. Even Stephen King, in the introduction to his anthology Skeleton Crew (1985), said it was a longtime goal to get a story in Playboy.

Naturally, with a success like this, there were imitators. Every MAD needs its Cracked. One wannabe Playboy, a magazine called Millionaire, lasted from 1964 to 1967. Not bad, all things considered. It blatantly copied from Hefner's formula. While each Playboy had its Playmate of the Month, Millionaire had its Heiress of the Month. For its May 1966 issue, the Heiress du mois was one Fawn Silverton. You probably know her better as Fawn Silver, the petulant and pouty Princess of Darkness in Orgy of the Dead (1965). In that Ed Wood-scripted, Steve Apostolof-directed burlesque show, Fawn is basically the Ed McMahon to Criswell's Johnny Carson.

Here's Fawn on the cover the magazine. Would this be enough to convince you to cough up 75 cents? (That's nearly seven bucks in today's money.)

All of those tycoons appear nude, by the way.

For those who don't know, Fawn's real name is Fanya Carter, and she came from wealth. Her father, Walter Carter, was once the head of Republic Pictures. In the mid-1960s, Fanya assumed a fake name and landed a few screen credits, Orgy being the most memorable. She soon got out of show business—way out of show business—and pursued an education. Today, she's a psychologist in Santa Monica and does not talk about or acknowledge her scandalous past. Here's a more recent picture of Dr. Carter, along with the cover a book she wrote about her father.

Fanya Carter; a biography of Fanya's father.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 13: The strange case of 'We Too Must Love'

(left to right) Marijane Meaker's book; Ed Wood's script.

One of Ed Wood's professional rivals—or, perhaps, one of his influences—just died. And I mean just died. Marijane Meaker, who wrote under a number of names (including her own) from the 1950s to the 2000s, passed away at the age of  95 on November 21, 2022. Think of that: she was only two and a half years younger than Ed, and she was alive until just a few weeks ago.

The late Marijane Meaker.

Like Ed Wood, Marijane hailed from the great state of New York, though she was from Auburn, a few hundred miles to the north and west of Ed's native Poughkeepsie. As a writer, Ms. Meaker rivaled Eddie in terms of versatility and productivity. Over the course of her half-century-long career, she jumped from alias to alias and genre to genre. As "M.E. Kerr," for instance, she wrote young adult fiction (Gentlehands; Deliver Us from Evie). As "Mary James," she wrote children's books (Shoebag; Frankenlouse). That's all very nice, I'm sure, and brought her a comfortable income and even critical acclaim. 

But what concerns us here today is the fact that, in 1952, Marijane Meaker pioneered the genre of so-called "lesbian pulp fiction" with a novel called Spring Fire. She wrote it under the pen name "Vin Packer," which she generally used for her mystery and crime books. In the heteronormative Eisenhower years, when being gay was still very much a taboo, the pulp publishers were the only ones who'd dare to release a book about lesbians. Marijane was a lesbian herself and eager to write about the Sapphic lifestyle, even if she had to do so under an alias.

Between 1955 and 1972, credited as "Ann Aldrich," she penned a series of five nonfiction paperbacks about lesbianism. The second of these, released in 1958, had a strangely familiar title: We, Too, Must Love. If you care to, you can read it here. Compared to the kind of stuff Ed Wood wrote, including his (often quite salacious) stories and articles about lesbians, Meaker's book is tame, tasteful, and subdued. The author based it on interviews with real women and approached the project as a journalist. The fact that these books were marketed as quasi-smut, complete with suggestive cover art, says more about the times than it does about the author.

But I'm sure Eddie was well aware of "Ann Aldrich." He kept pretty close tabs on what was happening in the adult publishing world, so Marijane Meaker's books about lesbianism would have been on his radar. Sometime in the 1970s, he wrote an unproduced screenplay called We Too Must Love, the title a direct lift from Meaker. This script might have been commissioned by Stephen C. Apostolof, since it wound up in the Apostolof archives. Thanks to Bob Blackburn, we have a brief glimpse of this never-to-be-filmed screenplay.

A couple of pages from Ed Wood's We Too Must Love.

Now, those of you who bothered to zoom in on that picture will see that Ed Wood's We Too Must Love was not about lesbians, at least not at first. Instead, it seems to be about the erotic adventures of someone named Jerry Hopper. But I think it's safe to say that, wittingly or not, Eddie was influenced by the works of Marijane Meaker. He had to grab that title from somewhere. So, MJ, we owe you a debt of gratitude.

Podcast Tuesday: "Abraham, Martin & Fonz"

David Hubbard, Gary Grubbs, Henry Winkler, and Al Molinaro on Happy Days.

Black characters rarely have much fun on Happy Days, largely because the sitcom only seems to bring them on when it wants to make a point about racism. 

As early as Season 1, there was "The Best Man," an episode in which Howard Cunningham (Tom Bosley) has misgivings about being the best man at the wedding of his Black former army buddy, Fred (Nashville star Robert DoQui). In Season 3, there was "Fonzie's New Friend," in which a young drummer named Sticks Downey (Jack Baker) can't perform with Richie's band at Arnold's because of the color of his skin. And Season 5 gave us "Fonzie for the Defense," in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Howard serve as jurors at a trial where the defendant, Jason (Ralph Wilcox), has been falsely accused of robbery at least partially because of his race.

Then, in Season 9, Happy Days made its ultimate statement about racism: "Southern Crossing," an episode in which Fonzie and his business partner Al (Al Molinaro) head down South in 1962 to protest segregated lunch counters. There, in some unspecified city, they clash with but ultimately befriend a young Black man named Charles (David Hubbard aka David Raynr), who wonders what these meddling white folks from Milwaukee are really trying to accomplish.

On the one hand, it's understandable that Happy Days would want to do an episode like this. After all, Season 9 of the show is set in the early 1960s, a time when the headlines were dominated by stories of the civil rights movement and protests in the South. If you're really looking back on this era of American history, you have to acknowledge this subject matter to some extent. 

On the other hand, Happy Days is a featherweight family comedy that has done such amusing but less-than-realistic episodes as "My Favorite Orkan," "The Evil Eye," "Fonzie's Funeral," and "Hollywood (Part 3)." How do you go from shark jumping to civil rights? Can you?

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we try to find out as we review "Southern Crossing." We hope you join us for what should be a very interesting episode.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 12: A Christmas memory from 'It Takes One to Know One' (1967)

The cover of It Takes One to Know One (1967).

Written under his own name and published by Pad Library in 1967, It Takes One to Know One is Ed Wood's most dense and challenging novel, perhaps even his literary magnum opus. A rambling, episodic story, it almost feels like two or three books that have been grafted together, Frankenstein-style. Some day, I may have to write a full review of it (or, even better, convince Greg Dziawer to review it with me on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast).

Waylon Smithers in a teddy bear costume.

Until that day, I'll just say that It Takes One to Know One is the saga of Don/Donna, a sensitive, effeminate young man who is raped and humiliated in a college town and who decides to become a hobo in order to escape his shameful past. While riding the rails, he is mentored by a tough young woman named Pat, who introduces him to the world of drag performers. One remarkable thing about this novel is that it's one of Ed Wood's few works to reference Christmas directly. Today, for the 12th installment of the Ed-Vent Calendar, I'd like to share a seasonally-appropriate passage from the book with you:

How do these things start? Where did it all start for me? I searched my mind so thoroughly there in the confines of that freight car while Pat, almost naked, gazed in her own thoughts, through the open doorway. The farthest back I could remember was a time when I was a very small child. It was a Christmas time. My little cousin, Doris who was about my age came to our house for the holiday visit. My mother and dad gave her a Teddy Bear snow suit. It was made of some kind of very soft fur. 

That Teddy Bear suit seemed to lure me from the first time it made an appearance. So it was a natural thing, the first chance which came about I tried it on. How I loved to wear that snow suit—the little coat—hat and pants. Whenever I had the chance I’d sneak into the darkness of the closet and put it on—wear it longingly and wish it were mine for good and always. It felt so good close to my body. 

Once I put it on wrong side out just so I could feel the fur against my skin. That was the day Grandmother came home early and caught me wearing it. Of course she wanted to know what I thought I was doing, and I told her I was making believe. She never did ask what it was I was making believe, and if she had I doubt if my juvenile mind could have come up with an answer. She just laughed and helped me put the Teddy bear suit on right side out. After all, at the time, I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. I could get away with so much then. She even tied the little fur and rubber boots for me. 

Grandmother always made such a fuss over me, and although she never mentioned it, at least to me, I’m sure she secretly wished I had been born a girl. 

Okay, so maybe it's not "The Gift of the Magi," but what do you expect from an Ed Wood novel?

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 11: Rob Huffman on Timothy Farrell

Rob Huffman wrote me with some thoughts on actor Timothy Farrell.

"You must think me a crackpot at this point," Rob Huffman recently said to me in an email. No, Rob, I can honestly say I don't think you're a crackpot. I know you're a crackpot. That's who writes me, ladies and gentlemen—the obsessives, the die-hards, the never-give-uppers. I mean, who else is still reading this Ed Wood series after nine years? Sane, healthy, well-adjusted people?

Anyway, a few days back, I posted a little article about Timothy Farrell's performance in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953). In response to this (I think?), Rob sent me an email about Tim's still-living son, an ex-cop turned private investigator. Rob was apparently going to contact this shadowy son but thought better of it after hearing him on a podcast devoted to private investigators. (Such things exist? I thought PIs kept a low profile.) According to Rob, however, the younger Farrell knew very little of Timothy's film work.

Even though Timothy Farrell (real name: Timothy Sperl) played key roles in both Glenda and Jail Bait, plus the Wood-scripted The Violent Years (1956), I have not invested any time investigating the man's life whatsoever. I've been solely interested in Tim as an actor. Or at least I was until I read his alarming IMDb biography:

Worked as a bailiff in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department while also working in the movies. One of his movies, Paris After Midnight (1951), was actually busted in a vice raid in the mid-'50s, which caused him professional embarrassment. He went on to work 20 years as an L.A. deputy marshall and eventually was appointed County Marshall in 1971. He was convicted of felony charges after his appointment, however, for "illegal use of deputy marshalls in political activities," and was given a six month sentence, but received probation due to poor health. He was fired in 1975.

Look, folks, I can't vouch for any of this. But you've gotta admit, it's interesting, right? And I'm well aware that those obsessives, die-hards, and never-give-uppers I mentioned at the beginning of this article already knew this stuff and probably want to send me a bunch more Timothy Farrell trivia. Which they're free to do, naturally. I can't promise I'll acknowledge all of it. Sorry.