Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 23: "Drop Out Wife" (1972)

Ed Wood asks one of the crucial questions of the 1970s with Drop Out Wife.

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'til they learn
I'm dropping out.  

-Linda Pastan, "Marks"  (1978)

James Lileks debunks the Me Decade

How did people ever make it through the 1970s? That's a thought I've had again and again as I watch the movies of Stephen C. Apostolof and Edward D. Wood, Jr. How could anyone survive this wretched decade?

Well, part of the answer is that many didn't. Eddie fell about ten percent short of the goal, expiring 386 days before New Year's Day 1980. Steve outlasted the 1970s, but his movie career didn't. He was a husk of a man after that and spent his declining years in exile from the entertainment industry he once loved. (And that had once loved him back!)

I personally witnessed about 42% of the decade, but I did so as a baby and a toddler and thus lacked the proper perspective that comes with age and experience. As I said earlier in this series, all movies are documentaries to an extent, and Steve and Ed's films certainly capture the era in which they were made. Wood and Apostolof did not set out to create 35mm time capsules, but that's what their work wound up being. From an anthropological standpoint, I am fascinated. From an aesthetic standpoint, I am repelled.

"Kids today think the '70s were fun," columnist and blogger James Lileks once wrote in response to a wave of nostalgia for the Me Decade. "They think the '70s were cool. They think that '70s stuff looks hip. Let me put this as delicately as possible: Kids today are idiots." Watching the Apostlof/Wood films from the early part of the decade, I can see what Lileks meant. It's an oppressively ugly world, filled with the horrendous furnishings, artwork, and clothing that Lileks has adroitly mocked, both through his website and books like Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s (Crown, 2004).

The people in these softcore sex flicks match their dreary surroundings. Not that they're physically ugly, mind you. Some are quite attractive. But their inner ugliness is somehow visible; it radiates out from them. There's something profoundly seedy and unwholesome about the universe they inhabit, and they've absorbed the sleaziness into their bodies. It's become part of them, like their skin or their hair. It doesn't come off in the shower either, no matter how hard they scrub.

Skulls: A classic Wood motif!

Sure, people might have been put off by the quasi-necrophilia angle of Orgy of the Dead (1965), but at least that film -- while shot entirely on a sound stage -- ostensibly took place in the open air. The Eisenhower-era squareness of Orgy's protagonists, "straight" couple Bob and Shirley, seemed genuine, while the screenplay's quaint werewolf and mummy characters were reminders of a more-innocent era of entertainment.

But a lot went down between Ed and Steve's first collaboration and their professional reunion seven years later. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down. The number of divorces in the US nearly doubled in five years. More headlines: the Chicago riots, the My Lai Massacre, the Tate-La Bianca killings, tragedy at the Altamont festival. Hendrix dead. Joplin dead. Morrison dead. When the Sixties died, they died hard. The top-rated television show of 1965 was the "family Western" Bonanza, a program I'm sure Ed Wood watched and enjoyed. Six years later, Bonanza had been dethroned by All in the Family.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Random House, 1971), Hunter S. Thompson identified 1971 as "this Foul Year of Our Lord." He probably didn't like the next year much better, as he spent it covering a dismal Presidential campaign. Thompson turned his reports into the pessimistic Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (Straight Arrow Books, 1973), whose first edition featured on its cover a skull -- that time-honored Ed Wood motif -- painted red, white, and blue with swastika-shaped pupils. The reelection of President Richard M. Nixon that year "drove a stake through the heart of the counterculture," according to film critic J. Hoberman in Midnight Movies (Da Capo Press, 1991), the seminal survey of cult cinema he coauthored with Jonathan Rosenbaum. The fact that Nixon eventually had to resign his post was, one might guess, cold comfort to the disillusioned ex-idealists who had attended Woodstock (or at least listened to the triple live album) and voted for McGovern.

Our great nation basically gave up on itself in the 1970s and simply surrendered to its demons for a while. "We can't fix the world," said young Americans, "so let's just have a good time having meaningless sex and polluting our bodies with every consciousness-altering substance known to man!" Naturally, middle-aged Americans wanted in on some of the action, too. If they couldn't participate, well, at least they could look!

And it was for these voyeurs, all but exclusively white, middle-class and male, that Ed Wood and Steve Apostolof created an especially toxic little bon bon of a movie about the so-called "swinging" scene and the ruinous effect it was having on American Womanhood.

DROP OUT WIFE (1972)

Absentee homemaker Angela Carnon explores the swinging scene in Drop Out Wife (1972). 

Alternate titles: Drop-Out Wife; A.C. Stephen's Drop-Out Wife; The Sensuous Wife [working title]; Pleasure Unlimited [Private Screenings video title]; Sexpraxis '74 [West German release title].

Availability: The easiest way to get Drop Out Wife is as part of the DVD sets Big Box of Wood (S'more Entertainment, 2011) or The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood, Jr. (S'more, 2008). The Big Box of Wood version features an explanatory introduction by filmmaker Ted Newsom. Private Screenings and Something Weird Video both issued VHS editions of the film, but these have become rare and expensive collectibles.

"Dropout wife" Wanda Adams with her 1972 Life cover.

The backstory: She has since been largely forgotten, but a Seattle woman named Wanda Adams was one of the cultural lightning rods of 1972. A married mother of three, Ms. Adams was infamous for her decision to "abandon" her family and live her own life, moving into a ramshackle old house with two other women. After amicably divorcing her husband, she took custody of her daughter but not her two sons.

This wasn't a unique story. Wanda was just one of many women who, emboldened by the burgeoning feminist movement, decided to reject "traditional" female roles and question the institution of marriage during those turbulent years. No one knew the exact number, but venerable CBS News estimated that there could be between 30,000 to 100,000 such cases in the United States.

What set Wanda apart from the others was her initial willingness to talk to the press about her unorthodox living arrangements. She thus became the de facto face of the phenomenon or, more specifically, its cover girl. On March 17, 1972, Wanda Adams appeared on the front cover of Life, then a very popular publication, which sensationally dubbed her "Dropout Wife" and dubbed her story "A Striking Current Phenomenon," both in bold red letters, perhaps subtly reminding us of Hester Prynne. Life most likely got the "dropout" tag from counterculture guru Timothy Leary's resounding 1967 edict: "Turn on, tune in, and drop out." Wanda, however, did her best to present herself not as an irresponsible libertine but as a sensible, intelligent woman who was simply not satisfied by her marriage and her circumscribed role as a wife and mother. The public, however, saw red and sent her Bible quotes and death threats.

Things got worse after a 1973 profile on CBS' 60 Minutes, also entitled "Dropout Wife," in which a grim, unsympathetic Mike Wallace questioned Wanda with barely-concealed hostility. The segment also featured Wanda's remarkably agreeable ex-husband, Don, and portrayed him as a wholesome, hard-working, all-American father who showed no bitterness at all toward his former spouse. Having refused alimony or child support, Wanda was then on welfare after losing her job at North Seattle Community College due to public outrage over her immorality. Further shades of The Scarlet Letter. One can almost hear the arguments that must have broken out in living rooms across America in the wake of that inflammatory 60 Minutes episode.

After that, Wanda disappeared from the public eye and resumed the life of a private citizen. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer caught up with Wanda Adams in 2002 and found a happily retired, remarried grandmother who volunteered in a local kindergarten class. Neither she, her first husband, nor her children seemed to have been traumatized by the famous familial shakeup of thirty years ago, and Wanda's only regret was having been so obliging to the media.

Stephen C. Apostolof took notice of the "dropout wife" phenomenon, apparently heard the sound of cash registers going off in his head, and called his old buddy Ed Wood to help him work on the project. The two men were apparently eager to capitalize on the runaway housewife fad, exploiting it while simultaneously passing judgment upon it in the grand tradition of hypocritical exploitation.

From what I can glean of their working relationship, Steve would have the basic idea for the kind of movie he wanted to make along with perhaps a general plot outline, and it was Eddie's task to turn that concept into a screenplay. For a few hundred bucks, Ed would sit down at his trusty Underwood and bang out one of his typical quickie scripts for Steve to film.

In the case of Drop Out Wife, the two men took a serious, socially-relevant topic and distorted it to the point that it was nearly science fiction by the time they were through. If you believe this movie, women were abandoning their hearths, homes, and husbands in droves so that they could booze it up, attend orgies, and go on wild blind dates with libidinous strangers. (How era-appropriate that Jimmy Buffet would ask the immortal musical question, "Honey, why don't we get drunk and screw?" in 1973.)

Just so the the movie didn't completely give itself over to misogyny, Wood and Apostolof made the film's discarded husband a clueless, selfish, sometimes abusive jerk. The wife in the film has a good reason for ditching him, therefore, but she doesn't get a free pass because she's banging drunken strangers while neglecting her kids. In a way, Steve and Eddie were hedging their bets by making everyone in the movie pretty awful.

The pros: Angela Carnon and Jaime Mendoza-Nava.

Not unreasonably, Steve preferred to work with competent, dependable professionals, both in front of and behind the camera. His two favorite leading ladies, Marsha Jordan and Rene Bond, were absent this time around, however.

Instead, the star of Drop Out Wife was Angela Carnon (aka Priscilla Lee, Gloria Jane Medford, and Angela Field), a model and actress whose film career was pretty much what you'd expect: a lot of softcore flicks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Chronologically, her career neatly overlaps that of Rene Bond. And just like Bond, Angela Carnon did land a couple of legit films, such as 1980's The Last Married Couple in America with Natalie Wood and George Segal, and married a fellow adult performer, in her case actor Norman Fields, with whom she appeared in several films, including Wheeler, Poor Cecily, Video Vixens and, yes, Drop Out Wife. (Angela and Norman don't have any scenes together, though.) The union didn't last, unsurprisingly, but neither did Norman's four other marriages.

Besides Carnon, the cast of Drop Out Wife did include several Apostolof stock players, like good ol' Harvey Shane (who also served as Steve's AD on this one), gap-toothed starlet Terri Johnson, and golden-haired semi-stud Chris Geoffries. Among the unbilled performers grinding against each other in the orgy scenes were Ric Lutze (aka Mr. Rene Bond) and the legendary Candy Samples.

Attentive audience members may think the film's part-rock, part-Latin, part-Muzak score is vaguely familiar-sounding, too. That's because its composer was another Orgy of the Dead veteran, Bolivian-born Jaime Mendoza-Nava working as "J. Mendozoff," a pseudonym that sounds like an over-the-counter sleep aid. Mendoza-Nava would use the same alias when he did the music for another Wood/Apostolof joint, 1973's The Cocktail Hostesses.

Pornography's target audience: "Socially retarded men."

  

The viewing experience: In almost equal measures, Drop Out Wife is compelling and appalling. Sometimes when we see a completely baffling movie, we ask, "Who was this made for?" And it's tempting to ask that question here, too, except for the fact that Stephen C. Apostolof had a very definite target audience for his movies, a group uncharitably but hilariously described by Rob Craig in his book Ed Wood, Mad Genius (McFarland, 2009) as "socially retarded men who were comfortable masturbating in a public venue."

Think about that for a moment. Before the home video revolution and well before the existence of the Internet, those who wanted to see a pornographic feature film had to do so in public. At least if you were watching a loop, you could do so in a private booth. But full-length movies were shown in theaters where you would be seated along with everyone else. If you were going to use a movie like Drop Out Wife as an aid to masturbation, you would have to do so in an environment where others could see you. And even if that weren't enough of a deterrent, there were still indecent exposure laws to consider. Hence the popularity of trench coats and raincoats among such viewers, which give rise to the colloquialism "raincoat brigade" to define so-called dirty old men.

I've not yet had the opportunity to visit a real live porno theater, if such establishments still even exist, so my vision of these places is mostly derived from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), in which disaffected loner Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) joined other sad, single men who listlessly watched X-rated movies in a scummy Times Square grindhouse.

One can only imagine what the "raincoat brigade" thought of Drop Out Wife. On the one hand, the film is replete with female nudity and simulated sex. On the other, however, its male characters are all portrayed quite negatively, while many minutes of screen time are devoted to women earnestly discussing their problems, and there is a truly traumatic flashback sequence in which dissatisfied husband Jim (Chris Geoffries) cruelly slaps his very pregnant wife, Peggy (Angela Carnon), causing her to miscarry.

I'm not sure what Apostolof expected his male ticket-buyers to do during the film's many downbeat and anti-erotic sequences. I'd like to think that Ed Wood, sympathetic to the plight of women, was slyly sabotaging Drop Out Wife from "the inside," so to speak. And Steve either didn't notice or didn't care. (If I were a porno director, though, I'd have to wonder why I was shooting so many scenes of people crying and arguing.)

Since this is a late-period Wood script, you already know that the characters in this film do a lot of drinking, but the ugly specter of alcoholism is really never made an issue. (It was in The Class Reunion, in which promiscuous Fluff mentioned that her husband, whom she sarcastically called "Angel Baby," couldn't attend the reunion because of his tendency to overdrink at such occasions.)

Kitchen confessions: Glen spills the beans to Johnny.

Structurally, this film owes a lot to Ed Wood's cinematic debut, Glen or Glenda? (1953). It tells the story of Peggy, a miserable housewife with two young children. (The kids are seen only briefly via photos). In desperation, Peggy leaves her stressed-out businessman husband Jim because the couple have no sexual chemistry and spend all their time arguing. She goes to stay with her "best friend" Janet (Terri Johnson), a swinging single who lives in a high-rise apartment and is balling one of her many short-term boyfriends (Norman Fields, who with his gaunt face and moptop hairdo looks like an aging British rocker; he could be a lost Beatle, a forgotten Rolling Stone, or a discarded Kink) as the movie begins.

Janet is more than pleased to have Peggy stay with her, and the two women spend a lot of time hashing out Peggy's problems while sitting at the dinner table. These scenes very strongly reminded me of the kitchen sequence from Glen or Glenda? in which Glen (Ed Wood) confesses his troubles to his pal Johnny (Charles Crafts).

And just like Glenda, Drop Out Wife is heavy on flashbacks. We get to see some of the significant moments from Peggy and Jim's marriage, most of which unsurprisingly revolve around sex. Since the couple's marital woes largely stem from their lack of sexual chemistry, most of their attempts at intercourse are unsuccessful and frustrating. Was it satisfying for Apostolof's audience to watch a man and his wife try and fail to get it on? I hope so, because that's what they got.

To balance it out, there are several scenes in which Janet sets Peggy up on blind dates, and we watch the "dropout wife" screw some jerky strangers, including a loudmouth pilot who refers to himself in the third person as "Captain Rogers" and makes silly jet-plane-type motions in bed. Some of these scenes end with Peggy finding out that her "date" is either married or engaged, which is a downer for her and for us, but at least our title character seems to be having fun before getting the bad news.

In terms of eroticism, the movie's main event should be the flashback scene in which Jim takes a very skeptical Peggy to a so-called "wife swapping" club that he heard about from one of his coworkers. What we see is another sluggish Apostolof orgy scene with a lot of naked white people fake-humping in an ugly hotel room. The big news is that Peggy, much to Jim's dismay, gets more enjoyment out of the club than her husband does and experiments for the first time with lesbianism. "What's a marriage?" she exclaims in one carefree moment of carnal ecstasy. Whoops!

By the way, I should mention that the most common sexual position seen in Drop Out Wife is missionary. Nothing wrong with that, per se, except that it means we see a lot of men's bare backsides rather than the women's nude bodies, which is probably what the guys in the audience really want to see. I guess it would be awhile before pornographers discovered that reverse cowgirl is the most photogenic of the heterosexual lovemaking positions.

Peggy's flashback to her traumatic miscarriage is a foray into dark surrealism reminiscent of the Glen or Glenda? nightmare sequence. It is easily the movie's most notable scene, and it's one of the standout passages from Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s entire filmography. What makes it so especially noteworthy is that it appears in a film that was ostensibly created as an aid to male masturbation. Any man who can maintain an erection after watching something like this would have to be profoundly disturbed, perhaps sociopathic.

Let me try to describe the mise en scene. At this point in the film, we have just witnessed the almost-Biblical conception of Peggy and Jim's third child. Already burdened with two daughters and unable to have sex in their own bedroom, they make love outdoors on the lawn during one of Ed Wood's archetypal thunderstorms. At the climax, Peggy moans, "Oh my god! Number three!" Cut to the three of spades being laid down on a kitchen table. We are in Janet's kitchen now. She and Peggy are playing cards while noir-ish lighting comes in through the blinds. They converse:

Janet: (contemptuously) Men! They can be the most disgusting, mixed-up creatures the Creator ever put on this crazy, mixed-up planet! 

Peggy: Do you hate men? 

Janet: Not really. I suppose they're a necessary evil. I guess we need 'em to live. I guess we need 'em for sex. Well, most of us anyway. So you really can't put men down altogether. Most of us really do need 'em for our own satisfaction. After all, someone has to go out and pay the bills while we stay home and take care of the house and the brats.

Two points to make about this dialogue: 1. Janet refers to God as "the Creator," something Ed Wood did in his script for Glen or Glenda? 2. Janet's suggestion that women use men for sex is an exact reversal of Rene Bond's diatribe from The Class Reunion.

Owls dominated popular culture in the early 1970s.

Apostolof now zooms in on an ashtray as the screen goes blurry, transporting us to a different kitchen: the one Peggy and Jim once shared in the suburbs. These kinds of transitions are common throughout Drop Out Wife, so much so that I really started taking notice of them. The camera will zoom in on a particular object -- often a light source such as a candle, a lamp, or a chandelier -- until it goes out of focus and ends the scene. Or, conversely, a scene might start with a blurry image that then crystallizes into something recognizable.

In any event, Wood and Apostolof now give us an almost absurdly stereotypical image of a housewife in her domicile. Peggy putters unproductively around her kitchen while wearing a plaid housecoat, fuzzy slippers, and giant pink hair curlers. She is obviously in her third trimester.

There is an owl-shaped cookie jar on the counter, reminding us of the owl painting from Necromania (1971). Come to think of it, both Woodsy Owl and the Tootsie Pop owl debuted in 1970. And, believe it or not, I have some plastic drinking tumblers from the 1970s with pictures of owls on them, too!

Anyway, we see Jim pull up to the family's modest-looking suburban house in a modest-looking car. Clad in a gray suit, he enters the kitchen and sets his briefcase down on the counter. Peggy tries to kiss him, but he pushes her away. Their dialogue is melodramatic and strained with long, dramatic pauses -- very much like what you'd find on a soap opera. The score and the camera angles are very soapy, too. Only the sexually explicit dialogue lets us know that this isn't a daytime TV show.

The language throughout Drop Out Wife is harsher and more vulgar than any other film I've reviewed in this series. Even in the hardcore Necromania, nobody was saying, "Suck my cock!" or "Eat my pussy!" But they do in this movie.

Here, then, is Peggy and Jim's conversation after he has refused her kiss:

Peggy: What did you do that for? 

Jim: Because it's just not there anymore. 

Peggy: There was a time when I meant everything to you! 

Jim: There was a time when you didn't look like this! There was a time when this house was spotless! And there was a time before all these goddamned... (he searches for the word) ... bills! And those brats are driving me up the walls! 

Peggy: How can you say that? You've got two lovely kids and a third on the way! 

Jim: (rolls his eyes) Yeah, and I should have my head examined! Now we got more bills! Now come the hospital bills! No matter how much overtime I put in, there's never enough! 

Peggy: Well, it was your cock that got us into this situation! You had your fun! Expect to pay for it! 

Jim: You little... BITCH!

He slaps her, hard, across the face. She drops to the kitchen floor and writhes in agony. He storms out. She holds her stomach and screams in pain. Cut to a flashing red light. A siren wails on the soundtrack. There's some nighttime footage (stock, perhaps?) showing an ambulance driving through what seems to be a very busy commercial district with lots of neon signs. This is another detail highly reminiscent of Glen or Glenda?, which also used sirens and ambulances during the suicide of Patrick/Patricia.

Peggy is now either on a gurney or a hospital bed. Her bandaged head rests on a white pillow as she wriggles and squirms under the covers. The scene is lit by a flashing red light, which intermittently illuminates Peggy's horrified face. The corners of the screen are dark. In the red light, we see the silhouette of a lifeless infant being held upside down. A shadowy hand slaps the child three times without results as Peggy looks on in panic. We hear stern, authoritative male voices discussing the case with grim finality:

Doctor #1: We lost the baby. 

Doctor #2: Let's concentrate on saving the mother.

The camera zooms in on Peggy as she lolls her head to the side and drifts into unconsciousness. The image goes blurry (again) and we cut to another blur. The picture now comes back into focus, and we see that it is Janet, listening to Peggy's horrendous story and shaking her head in disgust.

Janet: That goddamn bastard! You should've walked out on him! 

Peggy: Believe me, Janet, I wanted to. He felt so sorry for what he'd done, and he was under a lot of pressure from the office. And at home, I suppose. Things were never the same since then, though. We really tried. Boy did we try!

And this leads us to another discouraging flashback of Jim and Peggy trying to have sex. This is shown in great, though not explicit, detail with Chris Geoffries planting kisses on Angela Carnon's naked body. But could men in the audience possibly become aroused after what they'd just seen and heard? If not, what were they paying for when they bought their tickets to see this film?

The miscarriage sequence fundamentally changes the tone of Drop Out Wife and casts a pall over everything that happens subsequently in the movie. It is not merely unsexy but anti-sexy. From here on out, we know that sex equals trouble. Peggy even spells it out when she says that it was Jim's cock that got them into this situation. The villain of the movie is the penis itself. That's probably not the message that horny middle-aged men were hoping to hear.

My visual breakdown of the miscarriage scene from Drop Out Wife.

Peggy's kids: Are they all right?

The third act of Drop Out Wife, especially its final scene, is a complete betrayal of the rest of the movie, leading Rob Craig to speculate that it was imposed on Ed Wood by Steve Apostolof.

By this point in the story, the swinging lifestyle has taken its toll on Peggy who looks in the mirror behind Janet's well-stocked bar and assesses her own reflection harshly: "You look like hell!" and "You've aged ten years in a month!" Voicing her thoughts out loud, most likely for our benefit, she says that she misses her children and wonders how they are.

Very tentatively, Peggy picks up the phone and calls Jim. To say the least, the call is a disaster. Jim is irate, calls Peggy an unfit mother, and informs her that he's suing her for divorce and custody of the children. Peggy, naturally, is distraught by this. She is comforted by Janet, who throughout the film has expressed her dubious philosophy that one should constantly live in the present and not worry about the past or the future.

Janet and Peggy decide to have some "fun," which means hanging out in a dank, musty piano bar and schmoozing with a bunch of sleazeball lounge lizards, including Duane Paulsen and Harvey (Forman) Shane. Harvey announces that the bar is closing and that it's now "motel time." He and Paulsen escort Janet and Peggy back to a truly heinous-looking room with two double beds, and what happens next feels like an extended version of that scene in Fargo (1996) in which Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare have sex with two prostitutes at the desolate Blue Ox Motel. Only in this movie, the foursome don't end up watching The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson afterward.

Instead, Paulsen and Shane switch partners and, when they get bored of that, suggest that Peggy and Janet "make it" with each other. Peggy is no stranger to lesbian sex, but she's reluctant to go to town on her best friend. Janet's game, though. "Maybe I've always wanted to make it with my best friend."

Here is where the narrative falls apart. Janet has been the only person who has treated Peggy decently in this entire movie. Frankly, these two should be a couple. After all, Peggy's marriage to Jim is fundamentally beyond repair. Janet's a little immature and flighty, sure, but Peggy could be a stabilizing influence in her life. There's no reason this shouldn't work. But Peggy balks. She gets out of bed in a huff, leaving Janet behind.

Peggy: Oh, Janet, no! 

Shane: What are you getting so uptight about? It's just another little pushover! 

Peggy: Pushover or no pushover, I don't make it with girls! 

Janet glares at her. 

Paulsen: Okay. Get lost. Tramps like you are a dime a dozen! 

Peggy storms out.

Shane: (shrugs) Hmm! Some swinger, huh? 

Paulsen: Some hypocrite! 

Shane: Yeah, well, um... (clears throat) ...at least we're not hypocrites, right? 

Shane and Paulsen climb into bed with Janet, and the three make love.

The film's bleak "happy ending."

None of this makes sense. Peggy definitely does "make it" with girls, and she really is being a hypocrite to say otherwise in this scene.

And it's insulting beyond belief that Janet would instantly forget about Peggy after being her friend and confidant for the entire length of the movie. While not exactly Susan B. Anthony, Janet was something of a feminist throughout the rest of the movie, but the last we see of her, she's sucking some guy off while another mounts her from behind.

Worse yet is what happens after this scene. Peggy walks through a playground and sees the happy children there. We hear her echo-drenched inner monologue:

Peggy: (voice over) I wonder what my two little daughters are doing right now. I left them... and for what? To be free? To live? Truly live, I thought! What a joke! They're what's real! Maybe... maybe I can go back! They've got to take me back! We'll make it work this time! I just know we will!

The final image is of Peggy walking, then running, across a field to get back home to her horrible, abusive, neglectful husband. Last week, I said the ending of The Class Reunion reminded me of The Wizard of Oz. Well, this narration reminded me of another famous film from 1939, namely Gone with the Wind, which ends with a weepy Scarlett O'Hara all alone and talking to herself after being dumped by Rhett Butler. Like Peggy, Scarlett reassesses her priorities and plans how to win back her man:

Scarlett: I can't let him go. I can't. There must be some way to bring him back. Oh I can't think about this now! I'll go crazy if I do! I'll think about it tomorrow.(She closes the door.) But I must think about it. I must think about it. What is there to do? (She falls forward onto the ascending stairs.) What is there that matters? Tara! Home! I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!

So does Jim take Peggy back? Do they give this worthless marriage another shot, even though they absolutely shouldn't? Frankly, Ed Wood, I don't give a damn.

Next week: You know what we need, folks? Some fresh air and exercise! Something outdoorsy. What do you say? A ski trip sounds just perfect. As it turns out, Steve Apostolof and Ed Wood have one all set up for us, those considerate fellows!. And they've invited our old pal, Marsha Jordan, along for what the poster promises is "a Blizzard of Fun, an Avalanche of Action!" And who doesn't love blizzards and avalanches? I've been waiting for a movie in this series that would be even somewhat appropriate for the Christmas season, and now I have one. Break out your favorite reindeer sweater, pour some cocoa, and join me here next week as I review The Snow Bunnies (1972).

Dirty Made Dirty Movies can be ordered at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, BAM!, Bookworks, McFarland, Waterstones, Indigo, Kinokuniya, and other retailers.

Movie posters shouldn't have to suck

Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner were photographed in separate dimensions for this poster.

David O. Russell's American Hustle -- and forgive me for sounding like Dr. Seuss just then -- is a very promising-looking film. Top-notch cast. Interesting subject matter. Positive pre-release buzz. I'll very likely wind up seeing it. Heck, it might even be a contender for Best Picture for all I know.

The poster, however, is an abomination. It's not particularly distinctive. In fact, it's pretty typical of modern movie posters. That's partly what makes it an abomination. The film's five main stars -- all highly-esteemed, award-winning actors, mind you -- are gathered together for what should be a badass group shot but winds up being an unimaginative, uninspiring mish-mosh. Here's one major problem: each one of them has obviously been filmed individually, and their portraits have been lazily composited in a computer after being Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. And then there's the whole deal about who gets to stand where and what order their names are listed. Here, just take a look at this mess, both on its own and with my markings:

Hey, kids! See if you can match up each actor's name with his or her picture!

You can practically hear the movie industry weasels negotiating each and every little detail. The actors definitely seem to be divided into two distinct tiers. The top tier is headlined by Christian Bale, whose name goes first on the poster over his fellow tier-mates Bradley Cooper and Amy Adams. But Christian Bale's picture is in the center because apparently we can't have the top-billed star in the movie standing off to the side like a loser. In fact, no one's name is matched up with his or her picture, so the poster ends up being like one of those puzzles in an activity book for children in which the object is to match each name to the correct picture. (I have done so for you above, using nice bright colors to make it pretty and add a little visual interest.) The second, lesser tier is occupied by Jennifer Lawrence (who's currently starring in the #1 movie in the country) and Jeremy Renner, the only actor whose face has not been rendered as smooth and featureless as unmolded Silly Putty. In both tiers, boys outrank girls. But J-Law gets the "and" billing, which is supposedly a status symbol on television. I don't know if it's one in the movies or not.

The point here is that there's no reason for movie posters to suck this hard. There are decades and decades of beautiful, creative, and eye-catching artwork created to promote movies. Nowadays, movie fans on the Internet will gladly create such images for free just for the fun of it! Why, then, do crappy posters continue to exist? Do they sell more tickets? I cannot imagine that they do. If you'll look at the list of the top-grossing movies of all time, you'll see that none of them were advertised this way. In fact, the posters for such all-time box office champs as Gone with the Wind and Star Wars have become icons in their own right!

Please, Hollywood, end the tyranny of shitty posters. Thank you.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 22: "The Class Reunion" (1972)

Good thing they didn't make a movie about the second swingingest class ever. 

"Well, she was an American girl raised under promises. She couldn't help thinkin' that there was a little more to life somewhere else. After all, it was a great big world with lots of places to run to. Yeah, and if she had to die tryin', she had one little promise she was gonna keep. Oh yeah. All right. Take it easy, baby. Make it last all night. She was an American girl."

-Tom Petty, "American Girl" (1977)

Old Man: I sure hoped you'd make it, find your dream come true. 

Tony: I guess... I guess I never had a dream. 

Old Man: Maybe that's it. That sure might have been it. 

-Will Geer and Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966)

Steve Apostolof with Rene Bond.

"Everybody liked Rene Bond," observed film critic and historian Greg Goodsell in Jordan Todorov's 2012 documentary Dad Made Dirty Movies . And why shouldn't they? With her toothy smile, apple cheeks, chestnut hair, button nose, and wide brown eyes, she was an accessible and appealing screen presence, the kind of sweet-natured girl you might have had a crush on in high school.

Here was your typical small town homecoming queen, only instead of waving to onlookers from the back of a convertible as it cruised down Main Street, Rene Bond was cheerfully disrobing and performing sex acts both real and simulated in motion pictures and on stage. She wasn't pale and drawn, like some of her drug-addled contemporaries in the adult film business. No, she was pert and pink and raring to go. A healthy girl, you might say -- not sexually aggressive in a threatening way (you'd never cast her as a horny Nazi commandant, for instance) but sexually assertive and willing to take the lead in the bedroom.

Rene's characters made it seem natural and normal for a woman to seek sexual satisfaction in her relationships. Filmgoers were besotted. So were directors and producers, who hired her again and again throughout the 1970s for hardcore, softcore, and (every now and again) so-called "legit" pictures. Her profile at the Internet Adult Film Database says that she began her career in either 1968 or '69, when she was at that magic age of 18. She was represented in those early days by talent agent and cinematographer Hal Guthu, who remained a friend for the rest of her life.

Among Rene's earliest employers was that sultan of schlock, producer Harry H. Novak, who gave her a leading role in one of his beloved "hicksploitation" features, Country Cuzzins (1970). The very next year, Rene's career trajectory would intersect with that of Edward Davis Wood, Jr., who directed the vivacious starlet in his lovably ludicrous, self-penned Gothic sex epic Necromania (1971). After that came a series of starring roles for sexploitation kingpin Stephen C. Apostolof. People don't much think of Rene Bond as one of Ed Wood's actors, but the truth is that she was in at least four films that Eddie wrote and/or directed, which puts her ahead of Criswell, Vampira, Bela Lugosi, Dolores Fuller, and Paul Marco.

According to all that I've read and heard about her, Rene Bond was a consummate professional, easy to work with, and a proven box office attraction: a real living doll with a Kewpie face and a Barbie body. Every Barbie needs her Ken, naturally, and Rene's was her frequent co-star and boyfriend-turned-husband Ric Lutze. It's not difficult to imagine the conventionally-handsome, broad-shouldered Ric as the captain of the hometown football team, with main squeeze Rene as the head cheerleader. Sure, Rene's wonderfully photogenic C-cup tits were plastic (she was an early adopter in the field of cosmetic surgery), but then again, so were Barbie's! Although some X -rated stars were running away from abusive or dysfunctional homes, Rene had plenty of familial support. While Mom happily accompanied her to gigs, Dad took inordinate pride in his daughter's exhibitionist career as a stripper and porn star, blissfully unconcerned with how it might affect his status as a member of the local chamber of commerce. Rene would croon "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in her act and even bring the old man out on stage with her. Greg Goodsell comments again, this time via Facebook:

For the longest time these older guys would come forward to say that they saw Rene doing explicit stripteases around Hollywood [including the Ivar Burlesque Theatre] and Burbank and at the end of the show she would bring her dad on upstage. Director James Bryan confirmed all of this when I interviewed him a few years ago.

Then as now, adult film performers often worked under assumed names -- that is, when they opted to take screen credit at all. No exception to this rule, Rene Bond was known in her heyday by pseudonyms both mild (Mary Wendover, Karen Small, Mindy Brandt) and spicy (Lily Lovetree, Lotta Rocks). And there were multitudinous spellings of her own Christian name: Rene, Renee, Reneé, Renée, Reni, etc. But none of this seemed to be done out of shame or shyness. Rene was the type to shake hands, sign autographs, and pose for pictures with tuxedo-clad producers as they possessively wrapped their arms around her slim waist. She aimed to please and hit her target more often than not.

Mr. & Mrs. Levine: A porn star's temporary redemption.

If there were storm clouds on the horizon for Rene Bond, they first started to appear in her personal life. In the early-to-mid-1970s, the carnal contessa had two marriages go south on her, both to adult film stars. She and Ric Lutze split in '72, and a 1973 rebound marriage to Tony Maziotti stalled three years later.

But, still, the work continued. Always. Dozens of pictures a year, in fact, many not yet cataloged on the Internet. Magazine spreads, too. By the time Ronald Reagan took office as President of the United States and announced that it was "morning in America," Rene had passed the big three-oh and dropped off the porno radar. The days of the 35mm theatrical porn film were over by then anyway, and a new generation of young turks with VHS cameras had arrived to glut the market with cheaply-produced, narrative-free fuck flicks.

So where did Rene Bond go?

Well, as detailed in last week's column, Rene re-remarried, this time to a nice-looking fellow named Lonnie Levine with no apparent connection to show business whatsoever, let alone the smut racket. She and Lonnie appeared as gleeful, grinning contestants on the 1985-1986 syndicated game show called Break the Bank. The Levines' episodes -- a winning streak that netted a cool nine grand in cash and prizes -- most likely occurred in '86, as Joe Farago had already replaced Match Game's Gene Rayburn as host. The program identified Rene as a bankruptcy specialist rather than an actress.

Like previous Wood stars Tom Keene and James Craig, the former Ms. Bond had seemingly abdicated her showbiz throne for a more humdrum but dependable life as a mere mortal in the private sector. She was puffy-faced, permed, and polyester-clad by then and looked more suited to a PTA meeting than a porn set. But the famous megawatt smile was still there, and the eyes were as bright and expressive as ever. There was a hit song on the radio that year, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades." Maybe she heard it on the way to the studio that day. One telling, tragicomic moment in the taping occurred when her husband, typical of the doofuses with whom she was so often paired in her movies, misidentified the award given out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the Emmy rather than the Oscar. Rene playfully thwacked Lonnie on the arm for that. Maybe as a little girl, she'd once dreamed of standing on the dais of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and thanking all the little people who'd helped her along the way.

Rene Bond: An American girl

It sure looked like Rene Bond had beaten the system. She'd run the gauntlet and emerged intact on the other side, give or take a marriage or two. New job, new fella, new life, her years as a professional fornicator just a crazy, faded memory now. But she couldn't keep it together. A decade after Break the Bank, Rene Bond was dead from cirrhosis of the liver, a malady most frequently caused by chronic alcoholism and hepatitis. She was four months and nine days short of her 46th birthday. Even Ed Wood -- the walking cautionary tale -- managed to do better than that.

The fate of her third and final marriage is unknown, but there are vague reports of Rene spending many of her final years in Las Vegas, a locale once described by songwriter Wally Pleasant as "that boulevard of broken dreams where luck runs out of machines." She expired in Los Angeles on Sunday, June 2, 1996. Mr. and Mrs. Bond's outgoing little girl, the sweetheart who'd easily won over the public with her seemingly effortless charm, was gone. Like the heroine of Tom Petty's song, she was an American girl who died trying to keep that one little promise to herself.

I cannot help but feel that the world failed this young woman, an actress who projected strength onscreen but was as fallible and vulnerable as anyone in real life. Fascinatingly, there is an uncharacteristic touch of melancholy to the character Rene Bond portrays in this week's movie, a softcore production that reunited the creative team behind 1965's immortal Orgy of the Dead.

THE CLASS REUNION (1972)

A sampling of tender moments from Steve Apostolof's The Class Reunion.

French ad for the film

Alternate titles: Class Reunion; Private Screenings: Class Reunion; The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen: The Class Reunion; the film's German title, Heißes Verlangen blutjunger Mädchen, translates as Hot Desire of Very Young Girls. In France, the film was known as Les Tripoteuses.

Availability: This film is not currently "available" in the strictest sense of that word. For those who are very clever with their search engine skills, however, it is relatively easy to find online. Class Reunion was released on VHS in the late 1980s, but this edition (Private Screenings, 1989) is extremely expensive. Something Weird Video also seems to have put the film out on VHS as part of its series, The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen. I was unable to locate new or used versions of this edition. Good luck.

The mighty SCA Distributors logo!

The backstory: Ed Wood's life and career in the 1970s were heavily influenced by two key figures in the adult entertainment industry. One such figure was Bernie Bloom, the owner of Pendulum Publishing, a firm that cranked out X-rated magazines; quasi-scientific sex manuals; and even occasional films and loops. By a wide margin, Bernie was Eddie's steadiest employer during that turbulent decade.

The other major figure in Ed's life at that time was Stephen C. Apostolof, the Bulgarian-born filmmaker who wrote and produced softcore cheapies under the semi-pseudonym A.C. Stephen and released them through his own company, SCA Distributors. Bernie and Steve were Ed Wood's two most reliable patrons during his declining years, and it's a coin toss whether they were tossing him a lifeline or working him like a pack mule for little to no money. Both were dismayed by Eddie's drinking, but both kept hiring him -- not only because he worked quickly and cheaply but because they genuinely liked the guy. Bernie claimed that he threw as much work as he could Eddie's way "because the harder he worked, the less he had time to drink." It's quite possible that Steve felt the same way. In any event, Ed's wife Kathy definitely preferred Bernie to Steve, as she would tell Rudolph Grey:

Over the years, Eddie bounced back and forth between Bernie Bloom and Steve Apostolof like a ping pong ball. I hated when Steve would try to get Eddie away from Bernie. "We're gonna make another picture, Pappy. Come on, Eddie. Come on, Pappy." How many times did I plead with Eddie to stay with Bernie and a regular guaranteed paycheck? You know, Bernie did love Eddie in a way, and I know Eddie loved Bernie. He tested Bernie too many times. Eddie was such a kid in a way.When Bernie fired him, it broke his heart.

True, Ed Wood's seven-year tenure at Pendulum (roughly 1968-1975), with its factory-like office on West Pico Boulevard in LA, was the closest thing he had to a steady job since he'd been a night production coordinator at Universal in the early 1950s. Essentially, both of those were clerical jobs, relying on Eddie's formidable skill with a typewriter. He churned out stories for Bernie Bloom just as mechanically as he'd once churned out call sheets for Universal.

Clearly, though, Steve Apostolof was offering Ed something more tempting: the opportunity to get back in pictures and see characters saying his words up there on the big screen, the way he'd only dreamed when he was six and watching Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) at the movie house back in Poughkeepsie. How could he say no to that? Never mind that Apostolof was barely keeping the wolves at bay himself, financing each new movie with the meager profits from the last one.

In the long run, Ed Wood's decision to keep collaborating with Stephen C. Apostolof was a gift to his future fans. While the work he did for Pendulum during those years remains all but inaccessible in 2013, the SCA skin flicks are a mere click of a browser away. Best of all, Eddie got full credit under his own name in Apostolof's '70s sexcapades. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of sitting through these films is seeing the words "EDWARD D. WOOD, JR." in big, fat, yellow letters on the screen.

Steve Apostolof & Ed Wood.

Orgy of the Dead (1965) marked both Ed Wood's and Steve Apostolof's entry into the world of "blue movies," and apart from occasional outliers like Ed's monster movie Venus Flytrap (1970) and Steve's heist flick Hot Ice (1978), the sex film ghetto is where they would spend the rest of their film careers. Orgy, then, was a ghoulish debutante ball for both men, but their second collaboration along these lines would not emerge until 1972. Actually, that year marked their second, third, and fourth collaborations.

Since I cannot determine exact US release dates for The Class Reunion, Drop Out Wife, and The Snow Bunnies -- other than the fact that they all came out in '72 -- I am covering them in alphabetical order.

What had Steve Apostolof been up to between 1965 and 1972? Well, as documented in Jordan Todorov's self-explanatory Dad Made Dirty Movies (2012), Mr. Apostolof (or "Executive Filmmaker" as he ostentatiously added to his already-personalized SCA California license plate) stayed quite busy cranking out a series of movies affectionately referred to as "nudie cuties," with lots of bare boobs and butts but no onscreen penetration or explicit fellatio or cunnilingus.

As the 1960s wore on and below-the-waist nudity become more commonplace, "nudie cuties" started being indelicately referred to as "beaver pictures." Yet actual sex remained off the menu for those directors who didn't want to get hauled in front of a judge or have their movies and equipment confiscated during police raids. Strategic implication was the goal of such suggestive Apostolof flicks like The Bachelor's Dreams (1967), College Girls (1968), and The Divorcee (1969). You'll not find a "money shot" in any one of them.

The softcore subgenre was pioneered and perfected by director Russ Meyer, whose films are still considered to be among the most sexually arousing of the 1960s. Apostolof's films were never in Meyer's league, even with Eddie Wood at his side, but SCA productions featured competent cinematography, attractive actors, and storylines that at least attempted, albeit clumsily, to capture the cultural zeitgeist or ape more respectable "mainstream" entertainment. Many of Apostolof's late '60s films focused on the drug-infested counterculture, while 1969's Lady Godiva Rides took some cues from Tom Jones (1963) with Albert Finney.

Leading man Harvey Shane, then and now.

Like most any experienced director, Steve Apostolof had his own regular stable of actors: performers he could depend on to show up on time, say their lines, and do what he wanted when he wanted. The cast of The Class Reunion is chock full of these folks. These were Steve's people, let's remember, not necessarily Eddie's. You won't find the likes of Kenne Duncan, Duke Moore, or Lyle Talbot here. And Steve would probably have rather returned to Bulgaria, the communist-overrun homeland he fled as a young man, than work with Criswell again. In their place, alongside the aforementioned Rene Bond (or "Renee Bond" this time around) and Ric Lutze, you'll find such SCA stock players as:

• Marsha Jordan, a busty, Alabama-born blonde of a "certain age," whom we'd probably now call a MILF or cougar. After spending over a decade doffing her duds onscreen in one softcore flick after another from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, this former stewardess (who'd spent her childhood in a convent!) quietly retired from the business and devoted her time to being a wife and mother in San Miguel, California, apparently achieving the happy ending that evaded poor Rene Bond.

• Forman Shane (or Shain), aka Harvey Shane, an olive-complected, curly-haired leading actor who brought an earthy humor and credibility to his many, many roles for Steve Apostolof. As I learned from the documentary, Harvey was a close friend of the Apostolof clan, and Steve's children were a little weirded-out to learn that he'd done so many sex scenes in their dad's movies. Though no longer recognizable as his younger self, Shane remains a fine raconteur and has a good sense of humor about his film career.

• Terry (or Terri) Johnson, aka Judy Medford, a rather vacant and willowy blonde who spent roughly six productive years in the sex film trade, mostly tame softcore stuff but possibly dipping into hardcore a few times as well. (This is unsubstantiated; if you can prove or disprove this, let me know.) Besides her long, flaxen tresses, Johnson's most notable features are her upper teeth -- quite prominent and bifurcated with a Letterman-like gap in the front. She comes across as a hybrid of Joni Mitchell and Janis from The Muppet Show.

Unfortunately for all of these folks, Steve and Ed included, Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972) made movies like The Class Reunion all but obsolete. Throat was a narrative, feature-length pornographic film with graphic, non-simulated sex acts, and it achieved something no other movie of its ilk ever had before: mainstream popularity with respectable audiences. While Steve's films were directed all but exclusively at men, Damiano's movie was attracting couples... along with reams of free publicity and years of legal headaches as well. Dad Made Dirty Movies records Steve's initial reaction to the Damiano film as unimpressed boredom.

Marsha Jordan, meanwhile, compared hardcore porn features to "medical film[s]" with "nothing left to the imagination" and declined to participate in them. This is similar to a statement by cult director and Russ Meyer superfan John Waters, who said that watching hardcore porn was like watching open heart surgery.

But the public's mind had been changed, and Apostolof's films were no longer satisfactory to the average ticket-buyer, which meant that they were no longer satisfactory to investors or exhibitors either. Steve tried swimming upstream for a few more years, but it was all for naught. His once-prosperous career had bitten the dust by 1978.

Reunion attendee Marsha Jordan.

The viewing experience: Honestly, while viewing The Class Reunion, I had to wonder whether its makers had ever observed or interacted with human beings before making this movie. That's how odd and unnatural the characters' behavior seemed to me. Though theoretically more down-to-earth and naturalistic than Necromania, with its spooky, vaguely supernatural setting, The Class Reunion is even more opaque as a narrative experience.

Whatever twisted logic guided Ed Wood in the co-writing of this screenplay, Steve Apostolof's priorities as a director are instantly clear from the opening shot of the film: a close-up of Marsha Jordan in the shower, lovingly polishing her breasts to a high shine. Jordan is introduced tits first. It takes a few seconds before we see the actress's face and realize that she is wearing full makeup, including heavy blue eye shadow.

One might surmise that Apostolof, like Russ Meyer, was a breast fetishist, but there is a definite difference between the two men in this area. Meyer trained his camera on women's breasts because he loved them, obsessed over them, and wanted to feature them in the most cinematic way possible. Apostolof, on the other hand, repeatedly referred to boobs as "ticket sellers" when discussing his films. To the pragmatic Bulgarian director, tits were a means to an end, the carrot dangling at the end of the stick and luring horny men into the theater. To Meyer, tits were art, God's greatest masterpieces, and he was put on this earth to capture them.

Russ was the Rembrandt of tits. Apostolof was more like the Kmart of tits. Steve's movies are laid out like a convenience store, and he puts his most-desirable merchandise (in this case, Marsha Jordan's mammary glands) right up front so that customers don't have to go looking for them.

Structurally, this film is rather eccentric. Like a James Bond movie, The Class Reunion begins with a pre-credits sequence that has very little to do with the rest of the film. After emerging from the shower and painstakingly drying herself off, Marsha Jordan is visited by the local mailman, who presents her with an invitation to a class reunion. One might point out here that Ed Wood, Sr. was a postal worker and that one of Glen or Glenda?'s most memorable scenes involved a friendly neighborhood mail carrier who sought respite in cross-dressing after making his appointed rounds. So let's add "mailmen" to the official list of Ed Wood motifs.

Bafflingly, Marsha Jordan's character is called "Rose Cooper" in this scene but is identified as "Jane" mere seconds later in the opening title sequence. It doesn't matter anyway, since top-billed Marsha disappears entirely from the film after the credits. The prologue vaguely establishes that "the class of '69" (get it?) from "the old alma mater" is getting back together for a weekend. As we will see, it turns out to be a weekend of booze-fueled debauchery whose participants screw incessantly, indiscriminately, and without conscience.

The class of '69, together again.

Virtually the entire remainder of the movie takes place in a spectacularly unspectacular hotel amid the truly nauseating interior decor of the era: lots of murky earth tones, dark wood paneling, and shag carpet.

The setting reminded me that this film came out the same year as the historic Watergate break-in, which would eventually bring down the Nixon presidency. I realize that The Class Reunion all but certainly takes place in Southern California, but I couldn't help but imagine that the fateful burglaries were being carried out by G. Gordon Liddy's crew just a few doors down from where the onscreen action was occurring. (Fun fact: Liddy, like Ed Wood, had once lived in Poughkeepsie, NY.)

Alcohol was muscling its way to the forefront of Eddie's writing, so the reunion kicks off in "the French Room," which is merely the hotel's dingy, depressing bar. Bourbon appears to be the drink of choice in this movie; maybe it's what Ed was drinking at the time. The class of '69 amounts to about eight people by my count. From a distance, you'd guess them to be typical lounge lizards on the make, hoping to find someone to accompany them upstairs for some fun. There's nothing particularly nostalgic or collegiate about the gathering.

The ringleader of the event seems to be the satyr-like Charlie (Forman Shane aka Harvey Shane), a self-described "lowly account executive" who has arrived to the hotel without an escort and is eager for mischief. Winsome, buck-toothed blonde Liza (Terri Johnson) has been torching for Charlie since college and still gets "goose pimples" when she thinks of him. Athletic, all-American Harry (Ric Lutze) is now a football coach in Iowa and can't get over how everyone's matured since college!

Slender, troubled brunette Rosie (Starline Comb aka Starlyn Simone) is married, but her rich, older husband Jim is away on one of his frequent business trips. Fluff (Sandy Carey)-- and how's that for a definitive Ed Wood character name? -- is the class slut, plain and simple. Rosie counsels her to keep her panties on and her legs crossed, but we all know Fluff will not be heeding that prudish advice, as she quickly sets her sites on the even-more-improbably-named Wimpy Murgatroyd (Fred Geoffries aka Christohper Geoffries), a sturdy-looking lunkhead with platinum hair.

Flamboyantly gay Tom (Ron Darby) and lipstick lesbian Thelma (Rene Bond) seem to be married and acting as one another's beards. He's satisfied with the arrangement; she isn't. While he bats his eyelashes and flirts with every man in sight, she sulks in the corner.

Apostolof's College Girls

The Class Reunion could scarcely be a proper Ed Wood movie if it didn't recycle previously-existing footage in utterly weird and arbitrary ways. Thus, the boozy bonhomie of the French Room is suddenly threatened by a noisy demonstration outside. It seems some young, shaggy-haired folks are marching down the street to protest the war in Vietnam. (Apostolof has clumsily inserted some newsreel footage of hippies into his film.)

Now, our main characters in The Class Reunion are supposed to be in their early 20s and should probably be social liberals at this stage in their lives, but this film was created by two fortysomething conservatives, one a staunch anti-communist (Apostolof), the other a battle-decorated ex-Marine (Wood), and the script reflects their stodgy, reactionary views. The college graduates therefore react to these young ruffians as if they were members of a hostile alien species. Wimpy snorts: "Nothing like those street apes ever happened when we were their age! You know, to think, I helped pay their school tax!"  Harry, too, is incensed. "The only principles they've got is called sex. S-E-X with a double X!" (That makes two films in a row with Ric Lutze spelling in anger.)

Charlie, to his credit, is more lenient toward the kids and reminds his classmates that they, too, used to engage in some kinky capers. To prove his point, Charlie invites the reunion attendees up to his hotel room to watch some supposed "home movies" from his "frat rat" days. (In those pre-VCR years, that meant he had to bring a projector and movie screen with him to the hotel!) The films indeed show that the gang used to participate in orgies, apparently in full view of a movie crew. In fact, these scenes are lifted verbatim from Apostolof's previous film, College Girls (1968), including a memorable shot of Harvey Shane jumping off a balcony while high on LSD.

The reunion attendees are shown nodding and giggling at Charlie's movies, as people tend to do when watching old films of themselves, but this gets a little uncomfortable when one scene seems to depict a rape. Perhaps Steve and Ed should have been more careful about the footage they chose to repurpose.

In any event, Charlie suggests that he and the gang have another orgy for old time's sake, and without any further prodding whatsoever, all the other characters immediately disrobe and start crawling all over each other on the hotel floor. The only abstainers are limp-wristed, lisping Tom and sullen, pouty Thelma. In essence, the film's two homosexual characters are not allowed to join in these heterosexual reindeer games. They're not missing much, though, since this must be one of the most listless and passion-free orgies in movie history. The only real eroticism occurs when Rene Bond, forced to watch from the sidelines, strips and fondles herself while gazing sadly at her nude, writhing classmates.

Thelma and Rosie bond over bourbon and bathrooms.

From there, The Class Reunion is merely a series of sexual interludes. In an amusing reversal of the "girl and gorilla" subplot from One Million AC/DC, hapless Wimpy finds himself unable to get away from the sexually insatiable Fluff, who keeps dragging him back into bed for round after exhausting round of aerobic intercourse.

In the movie's most regrettable sequence, the one highly likely to make modern-day audiences cringe, stereotypical "fag" Tom finds himself duped by a couple of con artists, Bruce (Con Covert) and Henrietta (Flora Weisel), who have a very impractical sexual blackmail scam going. I suppose they're a latter-day equivalent of the criminal couples in such past Wood films as Jail Bait, The Violent Years, and Night of the Ghouls. It's also noteworthy that, while disrobing, Tom twice compares his clothing to snakes (another key Ed Wood motif).

Meanwhile, Liza (whose name is mysteriously pronounced "Lisa") finally gets her chance to rendezvous with Charlie.

Rosie, the unfortunate young woman whose absent husband Jim is a good provider but a lousy lover, participates in the film's two most meaningful and interesting sex scenes. The first is her tender and erotically-charged lesbian encounter with jumpsuit-clad Thelma, who uses the opportunity to bash the opposite sex:  "Men are all beasts! They don't care what a woman likes or dislikes! They just wanna get their own climax and go home!" It's difficult to imagine that sentiment coming from Steve Apostolof, so I can almost guarantee that Ed Wood wrote the dialogue for this scene. That would also explain this befuddling, Wood-ian exchange while Rosie and Thelma are drinking (what else?) bourbon:

Thelma: I never could take that stuff straight! 

Rosie: There's some water in the bathroom if you'd like. 

Thelma: I've been in too many bathrooms lately. How many bathrooms have you been in lately alone?

The film's climax, which blessedly takes place outside the dreadful-looking hotel, brings Rosie back to the safe and familiar world of heterosexuality by pairing her up with bland nice guy Harry. "You're so kind and masculine," Rosie gushes, before the leisure-suited Lothario makes sweet love to her in a Garden of Eden-esque public park. "It's just like out of a storybook! So beautiful!" Harry enthuses. This movie came out the same year that Rene Bond and Ric Lutze's marriage broke up, and it's interesting that Starline Comb beds both of them in this film. During their romantic interlude, which is scored with sappy violins, Rosie and Harry take a moment to ponder the larger issues of life (as Ed Wood's characters are wont to do). At first, Rosie is despondent and seemingly channels Eddie's own existential, late-in-life despair:

Rosie: It seems like life has cheated us out of all the things we like best. Take me, for example. I like sex, and what do I get? An old, impotent, rich husband! What's happened with us, Harry? Where did all those years go? We had so much fun in college!

Later, Harry gently though incoherently talks her down when she gets too lofty:

Rosie: What makes people tick, like us? 

Harry: Us? 

Rosie: Well, yeah, us. Why are we here, and why are we so miserable at home? 

Harry: I don't need a professor to tell me that! I could talk about that subject for days.

But Rosie still insists upon pondering the imponderables, while Harry stays grounded. You can almost hear Ed Wood debating himself in this dialogue:

Rosie: I really like you, and I don't know why. 

Harry: Well, look, I don't question it. I just accept it. If there's gotta be a reason, we'll find out sooner or later! 

Rosie: I accept it, too, dear. But I'm so miserable and unhappy, and I keep asking myself why. 

Harry: Because we're asking ourselves too many questions, that's why.

The two lovers then undress and have satisfying sex in this serene, pastoral setting. Original sin has been cleansed away by the sunshine and fresh air, and Harry and Rosie are naked and beautiful and free in the glorious natural world outside the dark, sleazy hotel. The Class Reunion ends with these enigmatic yet sweet and hopeful words:

Rosie: Ah, it's so wonderful here! I wish I could stay forever! 

Harry: Yeah, life is so wonderful, and you're so beautiful! Maybe that's the reason, the only reason! Well, there'll always be another class reunion!

You will think I am being facetious here, but I am quite sincere when I tell you that this moment reminded me of Judy Garland's famous final speech from The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film Ed himself referenced in his One Million AC/DC script. If you'll recall, Dorothy has awoken from her strange and eventful dream to find herself back in her Kansas farmhouse, surrounded by loved ones and clutching her beloved terrier, Toto, to her chest. Her aunt and uncle don't seem to believe her wild stories about the land of Oz, but this doesn't trouble her. As the MGM Orchestra builds to a crescendo, Judy Garland speaks these immortal, unforgettable words:

Oh, but anyway, Toto, we're home! Home! And this is my room -- and you're all here! And I'm not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all! And -- Oh, Auntie Em -- there's no place like home!

Or as Ed Wood might have put it, "Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like a class reunion!"

Next week: We go from graduates to dropouts! At the Human Be-In, a 1967 hippie tribal gathering in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, author and psychologist Timothy Leary, a man older than either Ed Wood or Steve Apostolof, made one of the 20th century's resounding statements: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Those six widely-heeded, hotly-contested words had a seismic impact on American culture in the 1960s. 

Five years later, Wood and Apostolof were still struggling to figure things out, as evidenced by their very tardy cinematic response in which a curious housewife decides to check out the whole "swinging" scene in search of sexual and emotional fulfillment. Will she succeed... or will she, like Dorothy Gale, find that her heart's desire was in her own back yard? I guess we'll all find out in a week when I cover Drop Out Wife (1972).

Special thanks to Jordan Todorov and Greg Goodsell for their assistance in researching and illustrating this article. 

Dirty Made Dirty Movies can be ordered at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, BAM!, Bookworks, McFarland, Waterstones, Indigo, Kinokuniya, and other retailers.