Joe Blevins's Blog, page 26

Ed Wood Wednesdays: A review of the two-volume Bunny Breckinridge biography (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

John "Bunny" Breckinridge was the subject of an exhaustive biography in 2018.   

Rod Woodard, 2018, Bunny Breckinridge: Exalted as an Early Hero of the Gay Rights Movement, Book One (401 pages) and Book Two (440 pages), self-published, numerous small photos throughout, available for $9.99 each on Amazon in Kindle format only.

John Cabell Breckinridge, Jr. – known as Bunny to friends and acquaintances – was born to wealthy ex-patriate American parents in Paris on August 6, 1903. His familial line, with roots deep in Colonial Virginia and Antebellum Kentucky, established their fortune through tobacco, cotton, and the legal profession. As the great-grandson of both U.S. Vice President and Confederate general John Cabell Breckinridge and Wells Fargo Bank founder Lloyd Tevis, Bunny lived a life of inherited wealth, luxury, and prominence. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, his parents moved the family to England. Bunny spent 1916-1922 at Eton College, Oxford University, and Cambridge University before taking a grand tour of Europe.  Portrait of Bunny as a young man.In 1927, while working as a drag/burlesque entertainer in Paris, Bunny married a minor member of French royalty who accepted the fact that "he liked the boys." They had a daughter but divorced two years later. For the next decade Bunny performed onstage in French revues. Toward the end of 1938, he inherited part ownership of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. From then on Bunny’s primary residences were in Hollywood and Carmel-By-The Sea, California, while he continued to travel overseas regularly.
As an internationally-known, openly gay socialite with a bigger-than-life public persona from the 1930s to the 1980s, Bunny was frequently written about in Paris, New York, Hollywood, and San Francisco newspapers. If there was an elite party of note, he was sure to be in attendance. Society columnists loved to regale their readers with tales of Bunny’s lavish parties and zany antics. In 1954 he garnered extensive press coverage after claiming that he planned to undergo sexual reassignment surgery in Denmark, after which he would marry the man of his choice. Bunny’s plans came to naught though after the Danish government threatened to bar his entry. 
Two years later, Bunny played a lead role as an alien ruler in Ed Wood’s film Plan 9 from Outer Space. The pair first met through their mutual friend Paul Marco, who played the role of Kelton the Cop in three Wood films. At the time, Marco, Breckinridge, and David De Mering (who played the co-pilot in Plan 9) were living together in Marco’s modest home – despite Bunny being independently wealthy.
In August 1958 Bunny and three other men were arrested on child molestation and conspiracy charges related to their involvement with two brothers, aged 11 and 13. In March 1959 he was convicted on 10 counts of sexual perversion and crimes against children. A month later Bunny was judged not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to the Atascadero State Hospital. He was paroled for good behavior after six months. 
Bunny returned to his sybaritic lifestyle only somewhat constrained by the terms of his parole. On a trip to France in the 1960s he met a divorced American expatriate. Like Bunny’s first wife, she too accepted that Bunny "liked the boys." A whirlwind romance was followed by marriage and a blissful month or two in Paris. The pair then returned to Bunny’s home in Carmel where irreconcilable differences quickly led to a divorce.
The trust fund that fueled Bunny’s grand lifestyle was worth approximately $20 million in the late 1970s, but dark clouds were gathering on the horizon. At least $6 million abruptly vanished due to a bad investment made by his lawyer. Much of the rest was apparently lost to graft and general financial mismanagement, but the courts never resolved the exact circumstances. A series of health problems landed Bunny in a Monterey nursing home where he spent the last three years of his life. By the time he passed away at age 93 on November 5, 1996, Bunny was an impoverished ward of the state. He is only remembered today due to his brief association with Ed Wood.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
The author of this two-volume set, Rod Woodard, first met Bunny while attending the socialite's 70th birthday party in 1973. Even in the autumn of his life, Bunny was well-known throughout Carmel for his galas and attendance was still a feather in one's social cap. Book One opens with a multi-chapter narrative describing their friendship. It then begins a thread that runs through both volumes slowly unfolding how Bunny ultimately ended up in a California nursing home, the curious disappearance of most of his wealth, and Rod's efforts to get him better legal representation as well as a reestablished measure of autonomy. This is followed by several chapters on Bunny's genealogy, heavily footnoted with relevant historical detail. 
The covers of Rod Woodard's two (count 'em!) books about Bunny Breckinridge.
The remainder of Book One covers Bunny’s life from his 1903 birth through 1938. Highlights include his childhood, youth and early homosexual experiences in France; the family's move to England; his college escapades with a focus on student dalliances, homosexual clubs, and affairs with older men/professors; his post-graduation travels throughout Europe; his first marriage and its failure due to his mother's interference; his post-divorce life in 1930s Paris; and his partial inheritance of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in 1938.
A middle-aged Bunny with his pet cat.Book Two picks up the narrative in 1939 with Bunny’s relocation to the USA and follows the remainder of his life. Highlights include Hollywood stars and scandals; his travels to Europe and the Mid-East; his adult daughter's attempts to seize control of his trust fund; his party life in the 1950s; his public flirtation with having a sex change operation; his brief association with Ed Wood; the events that led to charges of child sex abuse against him; his trial and subsequent brief committal to a state mental hospital; his second marriage; and the waning decades of his party life. 
Not wanting to end Bunny’s saga on a negative note, the author provides a fictional happy ending – Bunny returns home in control of his life again and metaphorically walks off into a golden sunset – which he corrects with a factual and downbeat epilog.
The books are well-written, but they are not necessarily easy to read. Woodard's use of a discursive "you are there" approach extends even the simplest of events into a protracted narrative. This is amplified by a strongly novelistic style which renders an often-minute level of detail that surely no one could ever actually recall in real life. It all combines into a slow burn portrait of an effete gay man living a wealthy lifestyle disconnected from everyday concerns – The Gay Gatsby if you will. 
Whether Woodards approach works for you or not will rest solely on your level of interest in Bunny himself and the portrait of a rarified existence few of us will ever be fortunate enough to experience. These are certainly not books for those with merely a passing interest in the man himself. That is not to suggest, however, that there is not ample material here to shock, interest, and titillate the average reader. Caveat lector: Woodard acknowledges the use of pseudonyms and Bunny himself may be an unreliable narrator to a lesser or greater degree.
Bunny lived a capricious, flamboyant life, had an outrageous sense of humor, was renowned for entertaining grandly, and had a penchant for fragrances and costume jewelry. He described his mother Adelaide as a PIC (pretty, insincere, chatterbox). Nevertheless, she was a strong-willed and selfish individual who exhibited an unhealthy level of control over her child’s life until her death in 1958. Bunny was charming, genteel, eccentric, and had a dramatic flair for retelling the events of his life… real or imagined. He often stated that Barbara Bush wrote to him that she could not introduce him to any of her handsome sons because they would surely fall hopelessly in love with him. 
Many will be disturbed by the frank and lovingly-detailed accounts of Bunny’s first sexual encounters as an eight-year-old boy with the uniformly well-endowed teenaged and adult men working on his family's estate. It should be noted that Bunny claimed that he voluntarily initiated all of these trysts. In their personal interactions Woodard noted that Bunny could be positively Victorian one minute (recoiling from a photo in a gay porno magazine) only to produce a photo from his own wallet moments later showing himself nude with two other men in flagrante delicto. On the issue of his legal problems, Bunny claimed that he was completely innocent of any wrongdoing – it was a case of rank extortion by the boy's mother. Although Bunny did seemingly hedge his bets by claiming that the boys were promiscuously gay in any event.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
Bunny in Plan 9 from Outer Space.The Ed Wood content is limited to Book Two only and is a miniscule part of the narrative. One of Bunny's close friends from this time period ("Jack Soles") had nothing good to say about Eddie.

"Bunny began to involve himself with [a strange mix of people]... One of them was this Ed Wood fellow. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sandals, of all things, when I first met him at one of Bunny’s parties. I was totally dismayed by Bunny’s new class of friends… They were just not educated… and their conversations were filled with filthy language… most of the transvestites dressed like sluts and streetwalkers… After learning of Bunny’s acting abilities and financial status, Ed asked him to be in one of his motion pictures… You cannot imagine how absolutely stupid and degrading it was for a man of his stature and background to be seen in such trash… The following year, Bunny was supposed to act in another of Ed Wood’s movies called The Dead Never Die , but luckily it never came to pass… Bunny lived with Ed Wood for almost a year… Wood had no money, but Bunny chose to live with him anyway in Mr. Wood’s small, run-down shack… Thank goodness Bunny and Ed had a huge disagreement, and that was the end of that."

Bunny had even less to say about Eddie and almost none of it was complimentary.

“Oh, that was a hoot and an honor at the time I was making it, darling. Ed and I were lovers. It was exotic and exciting with big-name stars to headline with me. I was thrilled to get up each morning and be a part of it all. However, when I saw the final thing on the screen, with my name as the lead, I thought it was rubbish and was embarrassed to have been swept up in all that craziness… I was to make another film with that man, but decided against it… As it turns out, darling, we were lovers as long as I was putting money into his production company. When I refused to give him more, he said he could not remain my partner if I did not believe in his dreams the same as he did.”

Sic transit amantes.
This is probably as good a place as any to state that, as much as I like actor Bill Murray's hilarious interpretation of Bunny in Ed Wood (1994), he apparently could not have been farther from the mark. The real Bunny with his penchant for saying "darling" with regularity comes across as a much more refined and debonair individual. Murray’s accent and diction throughout the film project a commonness and coarseness that is simply not evident in Woodard's account. In 1994 Bunny was aware that he was being portrayed in the upcoming Ed Wood biopic, but health problems prevented him from participating in any way. Although he died two years after the film’s release, it is doubtful that he ever saw it.
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
Woodard is not wrong when he describes his two-volume opus as the story of Bunny's "coming-of-age and coming out as a homosexual during the waning dominance of Victorian sensibilities." Bunny unconsciously personified a particular kind of fin de siècle ambivalence and social withdrawal commonly seen amongst Western elites of the day. In many ways, he echoed French novelist J-K. Huysmans’ great Decadent protagonist Jean des Esseintes, the eccentric scion of an aristocratic family who retreats from the bourgeois world into an idealized, artistic microcosm of his own creation (A rebours, 1884). Unlike des Esseintes who eventually returns to the everyday world because of the toll artificiality takes on his health, Bunny stayed the course until the end. Or at least until health and financial difficulties cast him into the purgatory of a California nursing home with its nightmarishly recurrent hot dog dinners.
As stated in his books’ subtitle, Woodard makes the case that Bunny should be considered a hero and pathfinder of the gay rights movement through his wildly rebellious, highly sexualized, and ofttimes scandalous lifestyle. There is no doubt that Bunny was openly gay at a time when it was both a daring and potentially dangerous proposition. How inspirational he and others were to the contemporaneous gay community is certainly an unanswered question worth exploring. But the press coverage that Bunny garnered was hardly celebratory of homosexuality in the abstract. 
Setting aside his legal problems, Bunny’s idiosyncrasies, flamboyance, and class affectations meant that he was often treated as the non-threatening punchline to a broader joke that newspapers shared with their readers. More importantly, he was part of a well-protected class of social and economic elites who were generally allowed to live by a different set of rules. Bunny was often insulated from the vagaries of daily life, as well as the consequences of his actions, by the accident of his birth. Bunny Breckinridge: inspirational gay rights icon, the lucky beneficiary of an enviable patrimony, or perhaps both?

In this 1954 photo, Bunny buys a vehicle from Los Angeles car dealer Morrie Roth

Podcast Tuesday: "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like the Fonz)"

Michael Leon and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.
Viewers may not realize that TV networks occasionally air episodes of their favorite shows out of order. Producers, even very successful ones like Garry Marshall, have little to no control over this. If a network executive wants to switch the order around, maybe because he thinks a certain episode will perform better during a particular week, he'll do it. Continuity be damned.
For the most part, this isn't a problem for a series like Happy Days, where the episodes are generally self-contained and serialization is minimal. But things got out of hand during the show's final season in 1983-84. One of the major arcs of the season involved Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Roger (Ted McGinley) working at Patton, a tough vocational school populated by stereotypical hoodlums and thugs. Thanks to ABC's odd scheduling decisions, there were several brief mentions of Patton on Happy Days before any of the episodes about the school had even aired! And then, in "You Get What You Pay For," Joanie casually mentions teaching at Patton, even though she didn't start until "Kiss Me, Teach" a week later.
All this shuffling around by ABC led to two "very special episodes" about Patton being aired back-to-back: the aforementioned "Kiss Me, Teach," in which Joanie is almost sexually assaulted, and "The People vs. The Fonz," in which Fonzie is (falsely) accused of hitting a student (guest star Michael Leon). And the latter is exactly the episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast . You can find out what we thought by listening to the podcast below:

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 168: Tales from the Huffman Files

Five points if you know which TV show I'm referencing. (HINT: It ain't Tales from the Crypt.)

Remember trick-or-treating when you were a kid? You'd try to keep track of what candy you were collecting along the way, but you'd never get an accurate inventory until you got home and dumped out that pillow case or plastic pumpkin head and sorted through your treasure. There'd always be some weird candy in there that you'd never heard of, stuff you'd never see any other time of the year. Mexican Hats? Bottle Caps? Mary Janes? Tootsie Rolls in flavors other than chocolate? All this stuff seemed exotic to me back then.
Well, I had a similar feeling this week when faithful reader Rob Huffman, host of Sin & Sci-Fi in the '60s , sent me some vintage Ed Wood-related newspaper clippings. These are the Mary Janes and Mexican Hats of Woodology, the obscure stuff that you wouldn't even think to look for because you never knew it existed in the first place. How Rob keeps finding this material I don't know. Let's sort through it together, huh?
The first item comes to us from The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, March 12, 1952, and concerns actor Kenne Duncan of Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1960) fame. While touring Japan in 1951, Kenne lost a .22 pistol that was later recovered in an irrigation ditch.
(left) An article about Kenne Duncan; (right) A Japanese poster for Kenne Duncan.
When he sent this to me, Rob joked that Kenne probably shot someone and ditched the murder weapon, but the cops covered it up because he was a celebrity. ("I'm kidding," he clarified.) Ed Wood fans will be familiar with Kenne Duncan's Japanese tours, which were documented in the short film Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960) and Ed's posthumously-published book Hollywood Rat Race (1998). You can read my thoughts on both of those things  right here . I guess the snarling Western actor, memorably nicknamed "Horsecock," had a major following in Japan. That puts him in the same category as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cheap Trick, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
Rob also sent me some tantalizing excerpts from Criswell's long-running syndicated newspaper column. Here's an item from 1972 about Ed Wood's long-gestating I Woke Up Early the Day I Died project, which was not actually produced until 1997. This was published in The Bridgeport Post on March 26, 1972.
Criswell (right) talks about The Day I Died.
Cris and Ed Wood were close friends as well as professional collaborators, so the celebrated seer would have known all about this unproduced screenplay that Ed had been working on (under various titles) since the 1950s. As of 1972, the script was simply called The Day I Died. The morbid plot description that Cris gives us makes the film sound a lot like Eddie's short story "Into My Grave," which was published in 1971. Notice that this column makes no mention of the main character's murderous crime spree. The other truly noteworthy detail is the mention of "Wes Kale, a dramatic new discovery." I cannot find any documentation of Mr. Kale, who sounds like a SpongeBob character. When the script was finally made, Billy Zane played the lead.
The next item on the agenda comes from Criswell's column of December 21, 1975. It, too, was published in The Bridgeport Post and concerns an aborted Ed Wood project called Erotica 76 that was totally unknown to me. Cris says Eddie was planning to direct it.
Was Ed Wood (right) hoping to direct Erotica 76?
Each new detail of this article is more baffling than the one that preceded it. Erotica 76? Jeopardy? Dennis Owens? What are you talking about, Criswell? You reference all of these things as if we know exactly what they are.
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) makes no mention of Erotica 76 or Dennis Owens. I cannot even find a director, producer, screenwriter, or actor of any note called Dennis Owens. (The closest is an East Coast  news anchor with that name.) Orgy of the Dead (1965) is a title we're all familiar with, but what is Jeopardy? Could Criswell be referencing the 1953 crime drama, directed by John Sturges? I doubt he's talking about the extremely long-lived game show of that name. That wouldn't make sense in this context.
Furthermore, how will a film that sounds like blatant, low-budget pornography "revive the old days of Hollywood" or "set the new trend of entertainment for the entire family"? I guess all of these questions (and more) will forever remain unanswered. But before we leave this news clipping, let's take a moment to appreciate Criswell's philosophizing about "the waves of time." Eddie makes this kind of dreamy, vague observation a lot in his writing; he and Cris truly thought alike.
The third and final Criswell article for today comes from the April 23, 1958 edition of The Escondido Times-Advocate and concerns the merchandising of the actors in Ed Wood's repertory company.
A Criswell column from 1958. Inset: An early 1980s ad for Don Post studios.
As mentioned earlier, Criswell and Ed Wood were good friends, and I think the former mentioned the latter in his column occasionally just to get Eddie's name in print. In those pre-internet days, a struggling writer-director in Hollywood needed as much media attention as he could possibly get. I don't know if Criswell's columns opened any doors for Eddie, but they couldn't have hurt. Ink is ink.
Here, the great prognosticator declares that Eddie will not only revive classic Hollywood horror movies but will utilize "the best combined movie and TV technics plus a new type of horror makeup." Perhaps  Cris was already describing Night of the Ghouls, in which Tor Johnson's badly-scarred Lobo wears the most elaborate makeup ever seen in a Wood-directed movie. In the 1960s, Tor's familiar face became the basis for a popular Halloween mask from Don Post Studios. That company no longer exists, but several versions of the Tor mask are still on the market today.
What's interesting is that Criswell predicted a whole line of masks based on the cast of Night of the Ghouls, but he doesn't include the three most obvious candidates for this treatment: himself, Tor Johnson, and Kenne Duncan. Instead, he suggests masks based on James "Duke" Moore, Paul Marco, Harvey B. Dunn, Mona McKinnon (who appears in Ghouls via repurposed footage), Valda Hansen,and even the obscure Jean Stevens (identified here as "Jennie"). Again, I think this was Cris' sneaky way of getting his costars' names in print.
Rob Huffman sent me further Ed Wood clippings, but I think we will save those for a future installment of this series. After all, you don't eat all your Halloween candy on one night, do you?

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 168: Tales from the Hoffman Files

Five points if you know which TV show I'm referencing. (HINT: It ain't Tales from the Crypt.)
Remember trick-or-treating when you were a kid? You'd try to keep track of what candy you were collecting along the way, but you'd never get an accurate inventory until you got home and dumped out that pillow case or plastic pumpkin head and sorted through your treasure. There'd always be some weird candy in there that you'd never heard of, stuff you'd never see any other time of the year. Mexican Hats? Bottle Caps? Mary Janes? Tootsie Rolls in flavors other than chocolate? All this stuff seemed exotic to me back then.
Well, I had a similar feeling this week when faithful reader Rob Huffman, host of Sin & Sci-Fi in the '60s , sent me some vintage Ed Wood-related newspaper clippings. These are the Mary Janes and Mexican Hats of Woodology, the obscure stuff that you wouldn't even think to look for because you never knew it existed in the first place. How Rob keeps finding this material I don't know. Let's sort through it together, huh?
The first item comes to us from The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, March 12, 1952 and concerns actor Kenne Duncan of Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1960) fame. While touring Japan in 1951, Kenne lost a .22 pistol that was later recovered in an irrigation ditch.
(left) An article about Kenne Duncan; (right) A Japanese poster for Kenne Duncan.
When he sent this to me, Rob joked that Kenne probably shot someone and ditched the murder weapon, but the cops covered it up because he was a celebrity. ("I'm kidding," he clarified.) Ed Wood fans will be familiar with Kenne Duncan's Japanese tours, which were documented in the short film Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960) and Ed's posthumously-published book Hollywood Rat Race (1998). You can read my thoughts on both of those things  right here . I guess the snarling Western actor, memorably nicknamed "Horsecock," had a major following in Japan. That puts him in the same category as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Cheap Trick, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
Rob also sent me some tantalizing excerpts from Criswell's long-running syndicated newspaper column. Here's an item from 1972 about Ed Wood's long-gestating I Woke Up Early the Day I Died project, which was not actually produced until 1997. This was published in The Bridgeport Post on March 26, 1972.
Criswell (right) talks about The Day I Died.
Cris and Ed Wood were close friends as well as professional collaborators, so the celebrated seer would have known all about this unproduced screenplay that Ed had been working on (under various titles) since the 1950s. As of 1972, the script was called simply The Day I Died. The morbid plot description that Cris gives us makes the film sound a lot like Eddie's short story "Into My Grave," which was published in 1971. Notice that this column makes no mention of the main character's murderous crime spree. The other truly noteworthy detail is the mention of "Wes Kale, a dramatic new discovery." I cannot find any documentation of Mr. Kale, who sounds like a SpongeBob character. When the script was finally made, Billy Zane played the lead.
The next item on the agenda comes from Criswell's column of December 21, 1975. It, too, was published in The Bridgeport Post and concerns an aborted Ed Wood project called Erotica 76 that was totally unknown to me. Cris says Eddie was planning to direct it.
Was Ed Wood (right) hoping to direct Erotica 76?
Each new detail of this article is more baffling than the one that preceded it. Erotica 76? Jeopardy? Dennis Owens? What are you talking about, Criswell? You reference all of these things as if we know exactly what they are.
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) makes no mention of Erotica 76 or Dennis Owens. I cannot even find a director, producer, screenwriter, or actor of any note called Dennis Owens. (The closest is an East Coast  news anchor with that name.) Orgy of the Dead (1965) is a title we're all familiar with, but what is Jeopardy? Could Criswell be referencing the 1953 crime drama, directed by John Sturges? I doubt he's talking about the extremely long-lived game show of that name. That wouldn't make sense in this context.
Furthermore, how will a film that sounds like blatant, low-budget pornography "revive the old days of Hollywood" or "set the new trend of entertainment for the entire family"? I guess all of these questions (and more) will forever remain unanswered. But, before we leave this news clipping, let's take a moment to appreciate Criswell's philosophizing about "the waves of time." Eddie makes this kind of dreamy, vague observation a lot in his writing; he and Cris truly thought alike.
The third and final Criswell article for today comes from the April 23, 1958 edition of The Escondido Times-Advocate and concerns the merchandising of the actors in Ed Wood's repertory company.
A Criswell column from 1958. Inset: An early 1980s ad for Don Post studios.
As mentioned earlier, Criswell and Ed Wood were good friends, and I think the former mentioned the latter in his column occasionally just to get Eddie's name in print. In those pre-internet days, a struggling writer-director in Hollywood needed as much media attention as he could possibly get. I don't know if Criswell's columns opened any doors for Eddie, but they couldn't have hurt. Ink is ink.
Here, the great prognosticator declares that Eddie will not only revive classic Hollywood horror movies but will utilize "the best combined movie and TV technics plus a new type of horror makeup." Perhaps  Cris was already describing Night of the Ghouls, in which Tor Johnson's badly-scarred Lobo wears the most elaborate makeup ever seen in a Wood-directed movie. In the 1960s, Tor's familiar face became the basis for a popular Halloween mask from Don Post Studios. That company no longer exists, but several versions of the Tor mask are still on the market today.
What's interesting is that Criswell predicted a whole line of masks based on the cast of Night of the Ghouls, but he doesn't include the three most obvious candidates for this treatment: himself, Tor Johnson, and Kenne Duncan. Instead, he suggests masks based on James "Duke" Moore, Paul Marco, Harvey B. Dunn, Mona McKinnon (who appears in Ghouls via repurposed footage), Valda Hansen,and even the obscure Jean Stevens (identified here as "Jennie"). Again, I think this was Cris' sneaky way of getting his costars' names in print.
Rob Huffman sent me further Ed Wood clippings, but I think we will save those for a future installment of this series. After all, you don't eat all your Halloween candy on one night, do you?

Podcast Tuesday: "Frankie and Joanie (SPOOKTACULAR EDITION)"

Erin Moran and Eddie Hartes on Happy Days.
Sometimes, I just can't help myself. When I realized that the 237th episode of our podcast, These Days Are Ours , was coming out a week before Halloween, I decided to turn it into our token "spooky" show, complete with references to The Shining (1980). After all, the number 237 plays a major role in that film. So you'll hear some creepy music and sound effects as we do an otherwise-normal episode of the show.
The timing on this is a little weird. Well, a lot weird. The episode we're reviewing this week is called "Kiss Me, Teach" and it's about Joanie (Erin Moran) becoming a student teacher at tough, graffiti-plagued Patton Vocational School. Patton essentially replaces Jefferson High in the final season of Happy Days. Both Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Roger (Ted McGinley) work there. Marion (Marion Ross) and Howard (Tom Bosley) are understandably worried about Joanie working at Patton, and their fears are justified when a creepy student named Frankie (Eddie Hartes) becomes obsessed with her and even tries to sexually assault her.
So, yeah, this is one of Happy Days' infamous "very special episodes." And I turned it into a Halloween spooktacular. What is wrong with me? You can find out by clicking the play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 167: John "Bunny" Breckinridge and the sex change that wasn't

Was Bunny Breckinridge really going to change his sex?
"Goodbye, penis!" Bill Murray (left) says his famous line.
That's a line of dialogue viewers of Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) will likely remember. It's uttered loudly and publicly by Bill Murray as John Cabell "Bunny" Breckinridge (1903-1996), the foppish millionaire who was an unlikely member of Ed Wood's coterie and even played a prominent role in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Why Murray chose to say those words in the exact cadence of Bea Arthur, I do not know. (But I'm glad he did.)
Some context may be needed for those who haven't seen the Burton film in a while. After the commercial failure of his directorial debut, Glen or Glenda (1953), Ed (Johnny Depp) is feeling down and decides to attend a wrestling match with his girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Bunny.  Although Ed is initially unwilling to engage in conversation, Bunny excitedly tells Ed that Glenda has inspired him to get a sex change in Mexico. "It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. But it wasn't until I saw your movie that I realized I have to take action!" Ed is intrigued; Dolores is mortified.
Later in the film, however, Tor Johnson (George "The Animal" Steele) approaches Bunny during the wrap party for Bride of the Monster (1955) and asks him about the sex change. But a depressed Bunny tells him the sad story of what happened on the trip: "Mexico was a nightmare. We got into a car accident; he was killed. Our luggage was stolen. The surgeon turned out to be a quack." At the end of the film, a caption informs us: "Bunny Breckinridge, despite much talk, never actually had his sex change. He is currently living in New Jersey." Which he was, although at 91 he was too ill to do any publicity for Ed Wood.
The indomitable Chuck Harter recently sent me a cache of vintage news articles about this very subject, all from early May 1954, i.e. after Glenda but before Plan 9. You might remember Chuck as the reader who sent me the articles about Bunny's legal troubles a few weeks ago. And, once again, we'll go through these items one by one.

Podcast Tuesday: "Splash!" or "Mr. Cunningham Builds His Dream John"

Tom Bosley, Erin Moran, and Marion Ross on Happy Days.
Plumbing is funny. It just is. Especially when it breaks. The bathroom is already the least-dignified part of any home -- think of all the embarrassing things you do in there -- and when those toilets overflow or those pipes burst and water starts going everywhere, the hilarity increases exponentially. Comedians have known this for generations. That's why the Three Stooges did plumbing shorts with both Curly and Shemp.
It took television a while to be cool with plumbing-based humor. It was a big deal when a toilet was shown on Leave it to Beaver in the 1950s, even though it wasn't being used for its normal function. (I believe Wally and the Beav were keeping a turtle in a toilet tank.) In the 1970s, the Brady Bunch house had a single bathroom for six kids but no (visible) toilet. When she was a panelist on Match Game, Suzanne Somers claimed that she couldn't even say the word "toilet" on Three's Company. At the other end of the spectrum, All in the Family got a big laugh by letting the audience hear Archie Bunker flushing the upstairs john.
Like the Brady manse, the Cunningham house on Happy Days only had one bathroom, but it was the site of some memorable moments. I remember some heart-to-heart talks between Richie (Ron Howard) and Howard (Tom Bosley) taking place there, for instance. The bathroom is also a major location in the episode "The Cunningham Caper." But Happy Days didn't really engage in any full-on, Three Stooges-style "exploding plumbing" humor until the Season 11 episode "You Get What You Pay For" in which Howard finally decides to install a second bathroom in his 4,000-square-foot home.
And what a coincidence! That's the very episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Other Ed Wood, Jrs. (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

Pictured here are Ed Wood, Ed Wood, Ed Wood, Ed Wood, Ed Wood, and Ed Wood. (Not pictured: Ed Wood.)
When searching for traces of our Eddie in archival records, the Wood-fan can be misled by published notices concerning more than a dozen other contemporaneous "Ed Wood, Jrs." that were roaming the American landscape. Three of these red herrings even had the unparalleled effrontery to be known as Edward D. Wood, Jr.! For the aid of fellow Wood researchers, I provide this abridged guide to the other juniors.

Podcast Tuesday: "Am I My Brother's Brother?"

Henry Winkler and Michael Holden on Happy Days.
As late as Season 11, the writers of Happy Days were not afraid to make major changes to the canon. I think TV shows were more casual about continuity in the 1980s than they are today. The December 1983 episode "Arthur, Arthur" makes two bold additions to the legend of Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler). First, he has a long-lost brother named Artie (guest star Michael Holden). Second, their deadbeat father Vito is dead, having drowned while at sea. All this in one episode!
"Arthur, Arthur" is a follow-up to a Season 6 episode called "Christmas Time" in which Vito himself (played by '50s rocker Eddie Fontaine) appears unexpectedly at Fonzie's doorstep but never actually identifies himself. Throughout the entire series, Fonzie deals with severe abandonment issues stemming from the fact that Vito ran out on him when Fonzie was still a toddler. With the specter of death looming over Happy Days in 1983, it was necessary to give our favorite mechanic some sense of closure. Even if it means just learning Vito is dead.
This is a milestone episode, and we have a lot to say about it in the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 166: The legal problems of John "Bunny" Breckinridge

Ed Wood fans know John "Bunny" Breckinridge from Plan 9.
John Cabell "Bunny" Breckinridge (1903-1996) only ever appeared in one movie, but sometimes, one is all it takes. As the haughty, aloof alien ruler in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Breckinridge is simply unforgettable, almost too good to be true. He is not just a flamboyantly gay man, but like the kind of over-the-top caricature of a gay man that you might see in a comedy sketch. And at the same time, his careful diction and quasi-regal manner suggest that he is a gentleman of considerable wealth and breeding. He gives off unmistakable "old money" vibes. 
For decades, viewers have watched Plan 9 and wondered how Bunny Breckinridge could possibly be real and how he could have ever wound up in such a low-budget science-fiction film. And while he's only a fleeting presence in Rudolph Grey's book Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), he's a major character in the movie that resulted from it: Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), where he was portrayed by Saturday Night Live's Bill Murray. (My favorite Bunny line from that film: "Nix on the nelly without losing the naivete.")
I've long planned to explore the fascinating, complicated life of Mr. Breckinridge, but I've just never had enough time. It's a little intimidating to know that author Rod Woodward (some handle, huh?) has released a two-volume biography of the man. But recently, reader Chuck Harter sent me a passel of vintage newspaper clippings about Bunny that detail the actor's various legal problems. Let's go through some of them together and see what we can glean about this John Cabell Breckinridge.