Joe Blevins's Blog, page 28

Podcast Tuesday: "The @#$% Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain!"

Ted McGinley and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.
During its seventh season, the normally-edgeless Happy Days did a couple of mildly risqué episodes ("Burlesque," "Joanie Busts Out") to compete with NBC's relatively racy The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, starring Claude Akins as a bumbling Southern lawman. Ultimately, the innuendo-laden Lobo was vanquished by Happy Days, but Akins and company had given the long-running ABC sitcom its strongest competition since Good Times back in Season 2. Happy Days soon returned to its inoffensive normal self, but not before being scolded by television critics for (briefly) becoming too smutty.
Happy Days faced an even more serious threat in Season 10 when NBC moved its rip-roaring new series The A-Team to Tuesday nights. How would ABC respond to this fierce rival? Would Happy Days start doing more action-packed stories to lure back former viewers? This may seem like a far-fetched idea, but don't forget that Happy Days had already done a number of stories with stunts and action scenes, including "Fearless Fonzarelli" (Season 3), "Fonzie Loves Pinky" (Season 4), "Hollywood" (Season 5), and most especially "Westward, Ho!" (Season 6), which featured a bull-riding competition and an out-of-control wagon.
The TV landscape was a-changin' by 1983, and action shows were in vogue. While Happy Days was getting outpaced by The A-Team on Tuesday nights, its spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi was getting clobbered by Magnum P.I. on Thursday nights. I don't know if this was purely a coincidence, but Happy Days aired one of its more action-heavy episodes, "Wild Blue Yonder," shortly after The A-Team moved to Tuesdays. The plot of this one has Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Roger (Ted McGinley) boarding a small plane that crashes in the mountains, leaving them stranded in a snowy wasteland. By Happy Days standards, this is pretty high octane stuff.
But does that make for a good episode? You know how to find out -- listen to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast . 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 158: Ten years of Ed Wood Wednesdays (2013-2023)

Here's how my blog looked ten years ago.
It was never supposed to be like this. Ed Wood Wednesdays, as I have explained many times over the last decade, was planned as a limited series back in 2013. Emphasis on limited. I'd just gotten the DVD box set, Big Box of Wood (2011), and already had a handful of other Wood films in my collection. I thought it'd be fun to put those films into chronological order and review them one at a time, supplementing my commentary with little historical tidbits from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), which was pretty much the only Ed Wood book on the market then. I'd start with Crossroads of Laredo (1948) and end with Hot Ice (1978). That was it.
The project came along at a time when this blog was in need of a new direction. Dead 2 Rights started in October 2009 as a spinoff of a zombie movie podcast called Mail Order Zombie, where I was a regular. But that show ended in April 2013, and I was getting a little burned out on the zombie-related content anyway. Less than a year earlier, I'd had a complete emotional meltdown and been hospitalized for suicidal depression, and this blog briefly became a journal of my recovery as I started taking meds and going to therapy. But I got bored with writing about that stuff, too. 
For a while, I busied myself with reviews of public domain comedies , thinking that those lighthearted, often corny movies from the past might help me shake off my melancholy. They didn't, but I'm still proud of that series. Maybe I shouldn't have abandoned it so abruptly. But the Ed Wood stuff eventually became this blog's main focus and crowded out everything else.
Here I am with my mother at Christmas.But why Ed Wood rather than, say, a more "respectable" director? Well, like many middle-aged people, I was probably trying to recapture some aspect of my lost youth. I first saw Eddie's films at a Halloween movie marathon in October 1992. I was a high schooler at the time, and this would be one of the last positive experiences of my teenage years. Shortly after that, my mother's cancer returned with a vengeance. Her death sent my life into a tailspin, and the next few years were bleak indeed. For me, Ed Wood somehow became an icon of happier times.
I never put myself forward as any kind of expert on Ed Wood, nor did I intend this series as a deep dive into obscure Wood trivia. In fact, that was the very opposite of my intention for this series. My goal was (and, to some degree, still is) to write for a general audience, and I felt these articles should be comprehensible to the average reader, even one who'd never seen any of Wood's movies. The immediate reaction to Ed Wood Wednesdays was largely positive, with each article getting several thousand hits -- small potatoes by internet standards but very good for a niche blog like this. 
Very soon, though, people started to contact me, either by email or through instant messaging. Some were merely curious and wanted to know if I'd be covering certain speculative Wood films or delving into Wood's written work. Some wanted to make corrections or school me on Ed Wood lore. Some wanted to promote Wood-related projects of their own. And some felt I was an interloper, horning in on territory that rightfully belonged to others. Every fandom has its share of gatekeepers, and Woodology is no exception. I have written of a so-called "Hollywood historian" who considers himself a Wood expert and who has been unfailingly hostile towards me for years. I try not to hate anyone, but this guy makes it tough.
There were some upsides to being the author of Ed Wood Wednesdays. Not many, but some. I was interviewed by The New York Times back in 2014. That was kinda neat. My father had no idea how the internet worked, so telling him about my blog was futile, but even he had heard of the Times. A few professional opportunities came my way because of Ed Wood Wednesdays as well. I know that I was asked to contribute to the Girl Gangs, Biker Boys book (2017) because of this series. The book Dad Made Dirty Movies also came about because journalist Jordan Todorov found my lengthy, detailed reviews of the movies Ed Wood made with director Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s.
The salad days of Ed Wood Wednesdays did not last long, though, maybe a year and a half. Then things started to turn sour. For one thing, Google's search algorithm changed and stopped sending people to my blog. It was like a faucet had been turned off. I lost 95% of my audience in a very short amount of time, and it has never recovered. A typical Ed Wood Wednesdays article now gets, at most, a few dozen hits. Only the diehards remained, and they wanted obscure Wood trivia that I was not always able to supply. My life, too, remained chaotic. I abruptly quit my corporate job on a whim in August 2015 and made a quixotic attempt at a career as a freelance writer with virtually no idea how that profession works. What was I thinking? I don't know.
This series probably would have ended in 2015 had it not been for Greg Dziawer , one of my most persistent emailers. He'd inundate me with Wood trivia, some of which I could barely understand. At the time, I was trying to make a go of the freelancing thing and didn't really feel like contributing anything substantial to this blog. (I found that, when I wrote for money, I was less willing to write for fun.) So I made the decision to turn the reins of Ed Wood Wednesdays over to Greg. 
I felt a little guilty about that choice. I called myself a writer, after all, but I wasn't even writing my own blog anymore. For the true Wood diehards, though, this was probably when Ed Wood Wednesdays "got good." Greg was much more willing to supply the graduate-school-level trivia that they wanted, and he made no attempt to court a wider audience with his articles. His stuff was for the true believers only. Greenhorns need not apply. He was combing through old magazines and loops and even contacting people connected to Wood in search of material for the blog. (I was never good at that.) More than once, I suggested he start his own blog, but he thought it was better to publish his findings on my blog. So the series continued.
Eventually, as my freelance writing career evaporated, I drifted back to Ed Wood Wednesdays. Between the main series and such supplementary series as Ed Wood Extras and the 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar , plus my individual reviews of Ed's short stories and magazine pieces, I have now written something like 380 articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr., totaling god knows how many thousands of words. It's possible that I've written more about Eddie than anyone, certainly enough to fill several books. 
What keeps me going? Well, it helps that the last 10 years has been a time of great discovery in the world of Ed Wood. So many of Ed's movies and written works have come to light in the last decade, and more continue to be found. It's truly the best time to be a Wood fan. Plus, as the founder of this blog, I just get stuff sent to me. I especially need to thank Philip R. Fry, Greg Dziawer, and Bob Blackburn for hooking me up with some Wood goodness. That's the ultimate perk of founding this series.
More than that, though, I find some kind of strange solace in the works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. I can't explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. It's not that Ed is a hero to me, exactly. He was a drunk who beat his wife; that's no role model. But in his films and his writing and, yes, his own life, he created this fascinating alternate universe that I like to explore, even after all these years. It's my own Oz or Narnia or Wonderland or Middle Earth, populated with beings as extraordinary as any you'd find in those fictional places. I got into this series to cover Ed's movies, but it's his prose that actually gives me the most satisfaction these days. There's just a certain cadence to Ed's writing I find comforting, and reading is for me a more immersive experience than watching.
Make no mistake, Ed Wood Wednesdays is a ton of work for me. It generates no money whatsoever -- quite the opposite, really -- and takes up an inordinate amount of time. That's something I have less and less of, especially now that I work a full-time office job again with a commute and also do a weekly podcast that requires hours of writing, researching, and editing.  But I intend to keep this series going as long as I'm physically and mentally able to do it, long after everyone has stopped reading it. Ultimately, the audience for Ed Wood Wednesdays is and always will be myself. I write these things so that I can read them when they're done.
Occasionally over the last ten years, people have asked me if I'll ever write a book about Ed Wood. I tell them that I have. I've just been publishing it online for free, one chapter at a time. And I hope it'll never be finished.

Podcast Tuesday: "Full Metal Fonzie"

Henry Winkler and Ed Peck on Happy Days.
Every fan of Westerns knows that a gunfighter's luck can only hold out for so long. As quick as he might be on the draw, he'll eventually get sloppy, careless, or overconfident. His reflexes will slow down with age, and then it's only a matter of time before he's gunned down by some up-and-coming hotshot. In the Coen brothers' Western pastiche The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), the sharp-shooting Buster (Tim Blake Nelson) strides into a showdown wearing a big Cheshire cat grin on his face and boasting of his skills. Mere seconds later, though, there's a bloody bullet hole in his cowboy hat.
"Well," he says with his usual understatement, "that ain't good." He then drops dead in the street. And that's the end of Buster's brilliant career. He's been outgunned by a younger man.
For many years, Happy Days was quick on the draw, too, and gunned down many opponents. The Richard Pryor Show, Cliffhangers, The Man from Atlantis, Grandpa Goes to Washington -- they all wound up on Boot Hill thanks to Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and the gang. The critics hated 'em and the Emmys ignored 'em, but did that bother the cast and crew of Happy Days? Nah. Why should it? They were still winning their timeslot well into the 1982-83 season. But then something truly unexpected happened that changed the face of television: NBC staged the comeback of the decade.
For most of the 1970s, ABC's only real competition was perennial powerhouse CBS. Apart from the rare hit like Little House on the Prairie and Sanford and Son, NBC was in the doldrums. But things changed at the Peacock Network in the 1980s under the leadership of new president Brandon Tartikoff. In January 1983, for example, NBC debuted an action-packed new show called The A-Team featuring breakout star Mr. T from Rocky III (1982). After just a few weeks, the freshman show moved to Tuesday nights at 8:00, directly opposite Happy Days. And Mr. T specifically called out the competition in a widely-seen promo, gruffly informing Fonzie that his happy days were over.
And they were. Happy Days took another year and a half to die of old age, but The A-Team siphoned away most of the show's audience. Tartkoff had sensed that Happy Days was vulnerable, and he was right. The ABC sitcom's ratings plummeted to their lowest levels ever. ABC cut the show's budget, evicted it from its normal timeslot, and eventually dropkicked it from the schedule entirely.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we review the February 1983 episode "I'm Not At Liberty." This was the first episode to go up against The A-Team, so we can call this the beginning of the end of Happy Days. It marks another milestone, too, as Fonzie's longtime antagonist Officer Kirk (Ed Peck) appears for the last time.
What did we think of "I'm Not at Liberty"? Funny you should ask...

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 157: I Watched Football Early the Day I Died (2023)

An unproduced Ed Wood script from the 1970s has now seen the light of day.
Francis William "Frank" Leahy. Now, where did I first run across that hallowed name from sports history? Probably in issue #11 of  Cult Movies magazine, which reported that Ed Wood wrote an unproduced film about him in circa 1975 called The Frank Leahy Legend. After a tiny bit of digging, I soon learned that Ed's script was based on a book by Bernard J. Williams and that the unmade screenplay still existed and was languishing in an archive in Los Angeles somewhere. Not being a football fan myself, I probably never would have heard of Leahy, who died in 1973, otherwise. He just wasn't on my radar.
A new book from Bear Manor.I could have pursued this case further, but I simply never got around to it. What can I say? Ed Wood wrote a lot of things in his 54 years, and a script about a 1940s Notre Dame football coach somehow didn't seem as exciting as a novel about a cross-dressing hitman or a movie about wife-swapping suburbanites. Life is short, as both Ed Wood and Frank Leahy knew all too well. So I let The Frank Leahy Legend stay on the shelf. 
But a couple of dedicated Woodologists, W. Paul Apel and Greg Javer, decided to hunt down the Leahy script, and now their findings have been published in a new book from Bear Manor Media called I Watched Football Early the Day I Died . In addition to the complete screenplay, rescued from the Loyola Marymount University archives, this volume contains a foreword by Bob Blackburn, friend to Ed's widow Kathy, and introductory notes by Greg and Paul. Best of all, Paul provides explanatory notes throughout the entire screenplay; it's like a commentary track for a movie that was never made.
While reading the screenplay, I kept thinking of a quote from the notorious John Andrews in Nightmare of Ecstasy: "Eddie wrote a horror script that would have been fine for 1934 but not 1974." Yeah, even during his booziest, porn-iest, most debauched years, Eddie could get mired in the past sometimes. What's most amazing about The Frank Leahy Legend is that Ed Wood (or anyone) considered it to be marketable to jaded movie audiences who'd already seen The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973). Even nostalgic movies from the 1970s like Paper Moon (1973) and The Summer of '42 (1971) looked at the past through a modern lens.
Meanwhile, apart from a smattering of profanity, The Frank Leahy Legend is the type of creaky, old-fashioned, highly sanitized biopic you might have seen in the 1930s or '40s, the kind that basically acts as a feature-length commercial for its subject. If you watch enough TCM during the off-peak hours, you'll see these flattering films about politicians, songwriters, war heroes, entertainers, inventors, and athletes. Try sitting through something like Swanee River (1939) or The Babe Ruth Story (1948), and you'll know what I mean. This type of cornball biopic was already old hat when Steve Allen starred in The Benny Goodman Story in 1956, and Eddie was trying to get away with an even cornier script two decades later! Actual line spoken (without irony) by an actual character in this movie: "You know Frank Leahy, you're truly an amazingly, great man..."
Leahy: Neither hero nor villain.But was Leahy amazing? Or great? Or amazingly great? Eh, I don't know. He certainly won a lot of football games in his day, but he did it by bending the rules just a bit. He got married. He had kids. He yelled at his players occasionally. He sold rubber or something on the side. He really liked Notre Dame. Does that count as a personality?
Leahy's life doesn't really fit any of the standard biopic templates, and in this unproduced screenplay, the reader can sense Ed Wood struggling to turn this material into something resembling a movie. I wouldn't call Leahy a hero or a role model, necessarily, and his life is not exactly inspiring. Then again, he's not a villain or a cautionary tale either. We can't learn anything from his story, because Frank doesn't learn anything from his own story. Even that scoundrel Charles Foster Kane has an epiphany in the last few seconds of his life.
Furthermore, Leahy doesn't seem to have had a quirky, outsized personality, the kind that would make him a good movie character. His coach and mentor Knute Rockne did, though, and Ed's screenplay makes Knute a colorful supporting character. Our protagonist, however, remains opaque. Either Frank Leahy is unknowable or there is just nothing to know about him beyond the surface details.
Either way, W. Paul Apel makes a splendid companion on this journey through the screenplay, jumping in whenever he has something to add or explain. (His commentary definitely helped me understand a few murky plot points along the way.) Unlike me, Paul's actually read the book upon which this script is based, so he can better explain how Ed Wood adapted this material. My guess is that Eddie was merely a hired gun on this movie and banged out this script strictly for the paycheck, but he manages to work some of his obsessions into The Frank Leahy Legend anyway. There are numerous funeral scenes, for instance, and even a prominent reference to Eddie's beloved angora.
For the most part, it seems like Eddie went out of his way to avoid showing any football in this supposedly football-centric movie. We know Wood was no sports fan, so when he wrote The Frank Leahy Legend, he tended to skip over all those pesky games and practices. Instead, we get a lot of scenes of Leahy talking to people in various offices. Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) are similarly chatty in nature, as is Wood's later film The Young Marrieds (1972). While the lack of action in this script could have been a budgetary concern, the stiflingly static nature of The Frank Leahy Legend makes it feel like something from Ed Wood's 1950s heyday.
Overall, The Frank Leahy Legend is an intriguing "what if?" from Ed Wood's strange career. It's a relatively wholesome piece of work from a time when Eddie's own life was anything but. Perhaps that's why he wanted to work on this project. It was a chance to do something with no connection whatsoever to pornography or even horror. This biopic may have been stodgy and old-fashioned, but it was respectable. This was one he could write home to Mother about.
You can purchase your own copy of I Watched Football Early the Day I Died directly from Bear Manor  or from online retailers like Barnes & Noble or Amazon .

Podcast Tuesday: "Escargot-A-Go-Go!"

William Sumper (center) and Henry Winkler (right) on Happy Days.
Happy Days was not big on serialization. It was a "status quo" sitcom that emphasized tidy endings and problems that could be solved in half an hour. And yet, by virtue of being on the air for eleven seasons, Happy Days was forced to evolve and adapt. Some actors left the show. Other actors joined the show. Everyone grew up or grew old. The TV industry changed. And gradually, little by little, Garry Marshall's nostalgic little sitcom mutated into something other than what it had been. An episode from 1983, like the one we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , barely resembles an episode from 1974.
I think the character that changed the most over eleven seasons was Fonzie (Henry Winkler). In Season 1, he was a mysterious, taciturn, and vaguely threatening figure—a greaser hoodlum who dropped out of school to hang out in the parking lot of the local hamburger joint. Garry Marshall thought of him as Happy Days' answer to Gary Cooper. But the show quickly domesticated Fonzie, having him move into the Cunninghams' house and essentially join their family. He got his high school diploma and became a respected member of the community, even returning to his former high school to teach, a la Welcome Back, Kotter. And we learned plenty of things about Fonzie's background and even got to know several of his relatives.
Fonzie's personality also changed over those eleven long seasons. At first, Fonzie's personality was defined by the single adjective "cool." That was Fonzie—tough, unflappable, aloof, and unknowable. But once Fonzie was housebroken, so to speak, he became a real motormouth and showed that he was often a nervous wreck behind his "cool" façade. That's certainly the case with Season 10's "Nervous Romance," in which Fonzie blunders his way through a date with his classy new girlfriend, Ashley (Linda Purl). All hell breaks loose when the two lovebirds go to the snootiest French restaurant in Milwaukee, the humorously-named Quail and Snail.
Does "Nervous Romance" make the grade? Or is this a misfire? Find out by listening to the podcast below!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 156: The Films of Bela Lugosi (1980)

Toward the end of his life, Ed Wood contributed material to this book.
People may compare Ed Wood and his misfit cronies to the characters in Nathanael West's Hollywood-set novel The Day of the Locust (1939), but Eddie's life actually reminds me of another Nathanael West novel: A Cool Million (1934). That darkly comedic book tells the story of Lemuel Pitkin, an industrious young lad from Vermont who ventures from his quaint hometown of Ottsville into the wider world to seek his fortune. Not only does poor Lemuel not find his fortune, alas, he keeps losing body parts during his various misadventures. By the end of the book, he's missing his teeth, his scalp, his thumb, an eye, and a leg. But even then, Lemuel's brave, foolish optimism has not entirely left him. (And it probably should have.)
There's a certain hapless, Pitkin-esque quality to Ed Wood, who wound up a penniless, toothless, washed-up alcoholic living in one of the worst apartment buildings in Hollywood and yet still had big dreams for the future and fond memories of the past. Just check out this letter, excerpted in Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), that Eddie wrote to author Richard Bojarski in March 1978, just nine months before Ed died:
"Too much on the fire."
Breaks your heart, doesn't it? Ed's talking about productions in both Norway and Mexico, and he can't even pay his rent in good old Los Angeles. I Awoke Early did eventually get filmed, but not until Eddie was in his grave. The Day the Mummies Danced, meanwhile, is still waiting for its day in the sun.
Richard "Bojak" Bojarski (1934-2009) was a writer and cartoonist from New York who specialized in classic horror history. His work appeared in magazines like Castle of Frankenstein and The Monster Times, and he published at least two full-length books: The Films of Boris Karloff (1974) and its natural sequel, The Films of Bela Lugosi (aka The Complete Films of Bela Lugosi) (1980). Bojarski got into contact with Ed Wood while researching the latter. Nightmare of Ecstasy includes an amusing/alarming anecdote about the epic meeting of Bojarski and Wood.
"I didn't know what he was talking about."
Sadly, Ed Wood did not live to see the publication of The Films of Bela Lugosi, which I'm sure he would've gotten a kick out of. Nevertheless, Bojarski graciously includes Ed's name in the acknowledgements at the front of the book. (Also thanked: Conrad Brooks, Paul Marco, Alex Gordon, and Mona McKinnon. Woodites aplenty!)
The book is not a biography of Bela Lugosi, per se, but it does include a 33-page biographical section—think of it as a sketch of Mr. Lugosi rather than a portrait—as well as an affectionate introduction by Lugosi's Mark of the Vampire (1934) costar, Caroll Borland. The main body of the book is an illustrated and annotated filmography, with each of Bela's films from Dracula (1931) to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) receiving a few pages apiece. For each movie, we get an assortment of B&W photographs, a rudimentary cast and crew list, quotes from reviews, and a few paragraphs of critical and historical commentary from Bojarski himself. (I'd have appreciated synopses of the films, but no dice.) For the sake of completeness, the author also includes an index of Bela Lugosi's pre-Dracula films, including those made in Germany and Hungary, as well as a list of Bela's many stage credits. All useful stuff, by the way.
The photographs in The Films of Bela Lugosi, including both publicity stills and behind-the-scenes shots, are excellent. Lugosi fans will want to own a copy of this book just to browse through it and see how their hero evolved over the decades. Wood fans will take note of a few photos in the biography, including one of Eddie and Bela posing in front of the Jail Bait (1954) poster and another of actors Tony McCoy and Loretta King visiting Bela in the hospital. Three Ed Wood films are included in the main body of the book—Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)—and each is nicely illustrated. I especially liked a shot of Bela on the Glenda set, flanked by Ed Wood, cameraman Bill Thompson, and producer George Weiss. And Eddie himself would have enjoyed the shot of Tor Johnson throttling pesky George Becwar in Bride of the Monster.
Is there any unique Ed Wood content in The Films of Bela Lugosi? A little, I'd say. A smidgen. We have to remember that this book was published over 40 years ago, well before the dawn of the internet, so it's amazing that Bojarski has his facts as accurate as they are. Bela's time with Ed is covered in the last two pages of the biography section of the book. Glenda and Bride are cited as examples of Lugosi working with "independent film producers" when he couldn't get work elsewhere. The book then briefly describes Bela's now-famous stay in rehab, including the fact that the premiere of Bride of the Monster served as a fundraiser for the actor's mounting hospital bills.
What's interesting is that Bojarski devotes a fair amount of coverage to the unmade Ed Wood script, The Ghoul Goes West. He tells us that the cast of Bride delivered the script for Ghoul to Bela when the latter was still in the hospital, and the horror-Western was to be the great actor's first role after his release. Unfortunately, says Bojarski, Gene Autry dropped out of the project "because of other commitments and backing dried up." Ed's authorship of The Ghoul Goes West is not mentioned here, nor is Ed referenced when Bojarski discusses the Las Vegas stage show The Bela Lugosi Revue. (Let me acknowledge here that Eddie's participation in that show is disputed by some.)
Eddie's name finally sneaks in during the third-to-last paragraph of the biography. Bojarski refers to Ed Wood as Bela Lugosi's friend and credits him as the director of Plan 9. He also says that Ed had further projects lined up for Bela, including Revenge of the Dead and The Vampire's Tomb, but that these plans were thwarted by Lugosi's death in 1956. Bojarski alleges that Lugosi died while reading the script for Final Curtain, but again he does not attribute this script to Ed Wood.
There are further interesting Woodian tidbits in the entries for Glenda, Bride, and Plan 9. The entry for Glenda, for instance, includes a humorous excerpt from the Los Angeles Herald Tribune's utterly bewildered review. (Sample quote: "Lugosi, the shrink, and an invisible omniscient narrator come together in a blend, or blenda.") In his own notes for the film, author Richard Bojarski reports that Lugosi's salary was $5,000 and says that Lugosi's role in Glenda was filmed at Jack Miles Studio in Los Angeles. Assessing the film critically, Bojarski says that it is an interesting look at transvestism and sex-change but acknowledges Glenda's "budget deficiencies" and "amateurish performances." As to Lugosi's role, Bojarski says the actor brings an "appropriate eeriness" to the film but complains that "his performance was weakened by awkwardly written dialogue." Funny, I can't remember Lugosi having any actual dialogue in the film, only monologues.
We then move on to Bride of the Monster. Bojarski quotes an article about the movie from something called the Independent Trade Review. This obscure publication must have disappeared into the ether entirely, since I can find no other articles from it. Anyway, their assessment of Bride is pretty standard stuff. (Sample quote: "Rest of cast tries hard despite cliché lines.") In his notes on the film, Bojarski alleges the project began with producer Alex Gordon under the title The Atomic Monster. Unable to raise money, Gordon handed the project over to Ed Wood, who "reworked" Gordon's script. Bojarski tells us that Lugosi earned only $1,000 for this film, which was shot at Ted Allen Studios and Centaur Studios. Bojarski also talks about the film's various titles and gives one I don't think I'd heard before: Monster of the Marshes.
The production of Bride is a big part of the Ed Wood legend, and Bojarski gives us many of the expected highlights, such as how Wood ran out of money midway through, how meat packer Donald McCoy and his son Tony took over the production, and how the film's octopus was borrowed from the John Wayne film Wake of the Red Witch (1948). If you've seen Ed Wood (1994), read Nightmare of Ecstasy, or sat through pretty much any Wood documentary, you've heard some version of this story. Again, though, keep in mind that The Films of Bela Lugosi came out in 1980, so this was all new information to most readers. What I found interesting about this section of the book is that Bojarski refers to Bride of the Monster as "Lugosi's last worthwhile performance" and calls it "an excellent example of an actor rising above his material." I wonder what Eddie would have thought of that, had he lived to 1980.

The annotated filmography ends with Plan 9 from Outer Space, which Bojarski lists as a 1959 release. I've gone back and forth on calling it a 1957 film and a 1959 film. (Currently, I say 1957.) As usual, Bojarski includes a quote from a vintage review, this time choosing one from the Motion Picture Herald . The Herald's critic must have been dozing through the picture, though, since he sees nothing to distinguish Plan 9 from the glut of late-1950s science-fiction flicks and calls Ed's screenplay "routine." Plan 9 is many things, but routine it is not. Bojarski apes this sentiment in his notes on Plan 9, blandly comparing it to Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956). (I've seen the latter but not the former. Maybe I should check it out.) As usual, what stands out here is Bojarski's assessment of Bela Lugosi's acting performance:

Lugosi was convincing as an elderly man mourning his dead wife before an open grave. The scenes of Lugosi stalking a cemetery in his Dracula costume as a corpse raised from the dead are deeply moving, especially as it was his last role.

I think this may be the only time I've ever heard any part of Plan 9 described as "deeply moving," but I must admit that Bojarski has a point.

Podcast Tuesday: "Jenny Loves Bingo"

Cathy Silvers and Robert Pierce on Happy Days.
Just like All in the Family, Happy Days was notorious for launching spinoff after spinoff—five in all, not counting the three (!) animated series. But Joanie Loves Chachi was different from the other Happy Days satellite shows. While Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley both featured guest characters who'd only appeared fleetingly on Happy Days, JLC centered around two ongoing characters, Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) and Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio), who were central to the original show. Happy Days had never done this before, moving two of its regulars to another night and another show.
Because Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi were so intimately related, crossovers between the two sitcoms were frequent. Marion Ross, Tom Bosley, and Henry Winkler all put in appearances on JLC, while Scott Baio and Erin Moran were practically regulars during the tenth season of Happy Days. This was done to spark interest in the flailing JLC, which was struggling against the powerhouse Magnum P.I. on Thursdays. But Happy Days' own ratings were crumbling by 1982-83, so it was in no position to help its undernourished sister series.
Nevertheless, in January 1983, Happy Days did its biggest crossover episode with JLC yet: a little concoction called "Life is More Important Than Show Business." This time, Joanie and Chachi brought their whole band with them: Mario (Derrel Maury), Annette (Winifred Freedman), and even spaced-out drummer Bingo (Robert Pierce). The latter gets to have a weird, amusing quasi-romance with hormone-crazed Jenny Piccalo (Cathy Silvers).
But what else does this episode have in store for us? And is life more important than show business? Find out by listening to the podcast below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 155: Letters from Female Impersonators, Vol. 3 (1961)

Ed Wood as "Shirlee" in the pages of Letters from Female Impersonators, Vol. 3 (1961).
One of the most exciting aspects of studying Ed Wood is that Eddie was so hyper-prolific, both as a writer and a filmmaker, that I will likely never run out of material of his to cover on this blog. Somehow, in 54 turbulent years, he managed to produce several lifetimes' worth of material. And there's an army of people out there—not a big army, but a determined one—scouring the archives in search of more Wood work. And they're finding it! Still today, over 44 years after Ed Wood's death, more of the man's articles, scripts, and films continue to bubble to the surface.
Last week, for instance, Austin filmmaker and queer historian  Elizabeth Purchell posted something incredibly exciting to Facebook and Twitter: several pages from a 1961 publication called Letters from Female Impersonators, Vol. 3. What makes these pages so special is that they feature vintage photos of Ed Wood in full drag, along with a letter he wrote under the name "Shirlee." This was such an astounding find that some fans were skeptical at first, but a scan of the entire magazine  turned up at the Digital Transgender Archive . The doubt soon evaporated.
Irving Klaw and Bettie Page.Letters from Female Impersonators, Vol. 3 is almost too good to be true. It comes to us from Nutrix Co. of Jersey City, NJ. You'd think a company with that name would be selling vitamins or protein shakes, but this Nutrix (a pun on "new tricks") was an adult fetish publisher of the late 1950s and early '60s. Besides Letters from Female Impersonators, their offerings include: Tales of Female Domination Over Man, Brutal Punishment for Captive Girls, Manacled Slaves Bondage Adventure, Punished in Petticoats, and Psycho Girl Handled with Restraint. The company's history was brief but memorable. As Shawn Langrick recently pointed out on Facebook:

Nutrix Co, from Jersey City, NJ, was the publisher of this and other "fetish" mags in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Irving Klaw was apparently the President of Nutrix. They were forced out of business in 1964 after being indicted on 84 obscenity charges.

In case you've forgotten, the Brooklyn-born Klaw (1910-1966) was the self-proclaimed "pin-up king" most closely associated with commissioning the fetish photos of Bettie Page. If you want to delve into Nutrix's legal woes, here is a good place to start. And there's more here . It seems that it was the company's bondage publications that got them into trouble most often.
The Ed Wood content in Letters is generous: seven full pages of a 64-page publication. (I've seen it described variously as a "magazine," a "book," and a "booklet." Choose the term that suits you.) We get four large B&W pictures of Ed in drag, plus a lengthy letter in which Ed gives his semi-fabricated backstory to the editor. 
Fans will want to spend some quality time studying the photos. We see Eddie in a variety of outfits and at least two brunette wigs—one with Bettie Page-type bangs, the other without. Although Ed's face has started to bloat and droop just a bit in his late 30s, he appears still relatively trim in the full-body shots. His makeup and jewelry are tasteful. I believe I see at least two separate angora sweaters—a cardigan and a pullover. Also, and I may be misinterpreting something here, but it looks like Ed has a bulging vein in his right forearm in one picture.
Who could have taken these shots, some of which are slightly blurry and overlit? Ed's wife Kathy is one candidate. These snapshots appear to have been taken at home, and I'd like to think we are looking at Ed and Kathy's bungalow at 6136 Bonner St. in North Hollywood. In any event, we get a glimpse of Eddie's very early 1960s-looking furniture. I noticed that, in one of the pictures, Ed appears to be doing domestic work, tidying up the living room. This is similar to the behavior of Alan/Ann ("Tommy" Haynes) in Glen or Glenda (1953).
(left) "Tommy" Haynes in Glen or Glenda; (right) Ed Wood in Letters from Female Impersonators.
The accompanying letter, attributed only to "SHIRLEE," is another keeper. Apart from the novelization of Casual Company, we have relatively few examples of Ed Wood's prose pre-Killer in Drag (1963), so that makes Letters from Female Impersonators, Vol. 3 especially valuable. I like that Ed kicks things off with one of his trademark stilted, oddly phrased sentences: "The best way to inform you is to give you some facts about myself." And what, pray tell, are those "facts" he wants the editors at Nutrix to know? Well, first and foremost, Ed talks about his early love of women's sweaters and their omnipresence in his life. "I learned to like the softness," he writes.
Eddie also gives us a rundown of his time in the Marine Corps during World War II, but he does not feel the need to exaggerate his heroism this time. He says only that he did four years, was stationed in the South Pacific,  and received an honorable discharge in 1946. No battle stories here. He then mentions working as a female impersonator in New York City, including at the long-gone Moroccan Village . He then mentions doing a "sweater girl" act in Washington D.C., where he had moved to "further my writing studies." If you'll recall, sweater girls were a major motif throughout When the Topic is Sex (2021). Eddie's brief time in D.C. has long been part of his self-curated legend, and in this letter, he states that he purchased his first angora sweater during this era.
Eddie devotes the next few paragraphs of his letter to another pivotal time that may or may not have actually happened—his stint on the carnival circuit. I think this letter gives us more detail than any other version of Ed's story. He claims he started as the operator of a coin pitch game and wore "male clothing." Business was lousy, though, so he started dressing in drag. This led, Ed says, to doing a "half-man and half-woman act" and eventually a "striptease in the girlie shows." What's especially interesting is that Ed says he had "a large natural bosom and needed no fillers to pad up my bust lines." When Eddie wrote about cross-dressing later in life, he often mentions men who do not need to rely on falsies to fill a brassiere.
Speaking of Ed's writing career, it's one of the major themes of this letter to Nutrix Co. "Always I have been writing," he states with confidence, mentioning a 1945 play and a 1946 novel. (Could both of these be Casual Company? It definitely existed in both forms back then.) Already in self-promotion mode, Eddie also offers to send several of his "unpublished articles" to Nutrix. He even cites three never-before-seen titles: "Pink Panties at Tarawa," "Caught in a Bombing Raid With Skirts On," and "Transvestite in a Studio Wardrobe." While it's unlikely these works will ever resurface, Eddie all but certainly reused this material in later stories and articles. To quote a line from Necromania (1970): "Baby, I don't waste a thing!"
If anything gets short shrift here, it's Ed Wood's filmmaking career. He'd been making movies for over a decade by this point, but he mentions nothing of being a director. Instead, he maintains that his female impersonator act landed him a starring role in I Led Two Lives aka Glen or Glenda aka I Changed My Sex. He does not boast about having written and directed this motion picture, and he doesn't even bother to name drop Bela Lugosi. I suppose he was tailoring this letter toward a specific audience, and these readers would be much more interested in hearing about the $400 angora dress that Eddie had "handknit for me alone."
Letters from a Female Impersonator, Vol. 3 is a wonderful artifact and we should all be very grateful to Elizabeth Purchell for bringing it to our attention in 2023. I'm telling you, the field of Woodology is only getting more and more interesting, and I know there are some more incredible Wood discoveries headed your way in the months to come. Boy, are you lucky!

Podcast Tuesday: "The Pros and Cons of Falling in Love"

Michael Spound and Crystal Bernard on Happy Days.
Crystal Bernard was obviously brought onto Happy Days in Season 10 to replace Erin Moran, who had been moved over to the ill-fated Thursday night spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi. With Erin gone, Happy Days still needed a perky young female character, and Crystal was there to fill that role. But is there any significant difference between Crystal's character, K.C. Cunningham, and Erin's character, Joanie Cunningham? Well, yes. Somewhat. Let's get into it.
From the earliest days of the series, Joanie was Happy Days' resident smart aleck—a quip-slinging, precocious little wisenheimer whose barbs keep the other characters, especially her brother Richie (Ron Howard), in check. Over time, Joanie matured, and her personality evened out a bit. She was still feisty and strong-willed, but she was no longer so caustic with her remarks. She showed a little more vulnerability, too, letting us know that even the seemingly fearless Joanie occasionally doubted herself. In many ways, she lost her autonomy due to her romantic relationship with Chachi (Scott Baio), though the two still argued frequently.
K.C, on the other hand, is supposed to have had an extremely sheltered childhood, even attending a religious boarding school in Texas before coming to live with her uncle, Howard (Tom Bosley), and his wife, Marion (Marion Ross), in the suburbs of Milwaukee. She is extremely naïve, gullible, and innocent—the ultimate goody two shoes. This makes her an interesting foil for the more worldly, boy-crazy Jenny Piccalo (Cathy Silvers).
The Season 10 episode "Prisoner of Love" gives K.C. one of her most interesting showcases on Happy Days. The plot has her falling for a newly-arrived mechanic named Jim (Michael Spound), only to learn that he's a convict on a work release program. Chaste as their relationship is, this is still one of the most scandalous chapters in K.C.'s young life. How does she handle it? Find out on this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 154: Another grab bag article

Yeah, it's another one of these articles. Sorry.
Because we're such good friends, I can tell you that my original idea for this week's article went bust-o, and I had to scramble for a replacement idea at the last minute. Oh well. These things happen in bloggerdom. So I decided to make this week's column another one of those "grab bag" affairs. Sometimes, they're a good way of covering little items that wouldn't quite merit an article on their own.
A dying gardenia.Like, for instance, did you see the  career-spanning interview that actress Patricia Arquette recently did with Vanity Fair? It's one of those deals where they show you clips from your old movies and TV shows and ask you to comment on them. I wondered if they would ask her about her role as Kathy in Ed Wood (1994), and to my delight, they did. Patricia shared this anecdote, which I don't think I'd heard before:

I got to meet Kathy O'Hara, who I portrayed in Ed Wood. My sister Alexis was already dressing in drag and doing shows in drag but hadn't really come out as transgender. And there was this whole storyline with Ed Wood, where he was a cross-dresser. And being able to talk to Kathy, who accepted Ed, loved Ed, didn't judge Ed for being a cross-dresser in the 1950s, was really a beautiful thing. 

I remember, she said to me, "You know, Eddie was so funny, the way he looked at the world. And he saw beauty in everything. One day, I showed up, and I was meeting him, and I was wearing this kind of rust-colored suit. And Eddie goes, 'Stop! Stop right there! I gotta get you something!' He ran down the street and then ran back, and he was like, 'Look at this gardenia! It's exactly the color of your suit!'" Now, of course, that's like a dying gardenia. It's like a rotting gardenia. It was so beautiful, like, Eddie didn't realize that it was something other people would cast away. He saw the beauty in this. And she saw the beauty in Eddie seeing the beauty in this thing and his innocence of his vision of the world. So beautiful to see somebody who could love people like that. It's nice.

Naturally, readers keep sending me little tidbits of information as well, bless their Wooden hearts. Recently, a reader named Matty ( @Reverend_Banjo on Twitter) sent me this very interesting missive:

Hey Joe. You've commented before on whether a scene in Fugitive Girls was influenced by A Clockwork Orange. As you say, Eddie kept tabs on pop culture, but I'd also like to point out that he used the phrase "ultraviolence" in 1965's Hollywood Rat Race, long before the film version of A Clockwork Orange. I'm interested in where he could've picked up "ultraviolence," since it's used in a (characteristically) idiosyncratic way. "If nudity is used for ultraviolence..." Perhaps he read the novel? 

This sent me down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Did the term "ultraviolence" actually originate with Anthony Burgess' 1963 novel, A Clockwork Orange? That book certainly popularized the term, but I found it in newspaper articles as early as 1923 in America and 1935 in England. Meanwhile, Google's Ngram Viewer says it goes back at least to 1926 . It's certainly possible, though, that Eddie read the Burgess novel. I know he scored the newsstands looking for fodder for his own writing, so a copy of A Clockwork Orange could have reached him there.
Finally, I want to say a word or two about Meatcleaver Massacre (1977), since a reader named Steve Frisch contacted me through Facebook to ask about this film and my review of it. Eddie's involvement is still speculative, but I want you to know that the film is now freely available on Tubi  in a print that is much, much better than the one I reviewed. Sadly, this version lacks the explanatory Christopher Lee footage. Oh well. Can't have everything. We do, however, have our clearest view yet of the extra who is supposedly Ed Wood during the press conference scene. Judge for yourself.
Is this Ed Wood in Meatcleaver Massacre?