Joe Blevins's Blog, page 33

Podcast Tuesday: "Roll Over, Scott Baio, and Tell Anson Williams the News" (OUR 200th EPISODE)

Henry Winkler and a bust of Mozart on Happy Days.
Two hundred episodes. Jesus, how did we ever let things get this far? 
Yes, this week marks the 200th installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , which started in October 2018  and has continued more or less steadily since then with its goal of reviewing each episode of the classic ABC sitcom Happy Days (1974-84). We're about 80% of the way toward achieving that goal now as we cover the show's ninth season out of eleven.
Sometimes, I feel like my cohost and I are playing an incredibly prolonged game of chicken. Surely, after a while, one of us will admit that doing a podcast about Happy Days is a ridiculous idea with an incredibly narrow appeal and stop this madness. But we don't. Neither of us is willing to back down. So the podcast continues—episode by episode, season by season. Garry Marshall is holding us hostage from beyond the grave.
As it turns out, our 200th episode is a review of the February 1982 episode "A Touch of Classical" in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) tries to get the kids at Arnold's to embrace classical music over rock. He's doing all this to get in good with his new girlfriend, a sophisticated music teacher named Cynthia (Small Wonder's Marla Pennington). The episode's highlight is a dream sequence in which Fonzie imagines himself to be Tchaikovsky. You call tell it's a dream because this version of Tchaikovsky is aggressively heterosexual.
What did we think of "A Touch of Classical"? There's one way to find out. Just click that play button down there and listen to the 200th episode of These Days Are Ours.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 139: Ed Wood in Spanish REVISITED!

Detail from a vintage travel poster that I thought was neat. It has no direct connection to Ed Wood.
My recent 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar series, which you can read here , was meant to be spontaneous, informal, and off-the-cuff. For the most part, I did not plan the articles in advance, nor did I do any intense research for them. They were more like journal entries. That definitely applies to Day 15 , a brief little blurb about how Ed Wood's movies were marketed in Spanish-speaking countries. It's a topic about which I know very little (as the article attests) but which does interest me.
A poster for Aranas Infernales.Well, that post received a very informative response from a reader from México named Jordan. I'd like to share his email with you now.

Hello, Joe. 
I am a B-movie fan from México and I have been reading your blog for several months now. As a legitimate Ed Wood fan I must say that I loved it. It's great to have people dig out more and more information about the man, even if it's something small.

What inspired me to message you is your post about the Spanish lobby cards and posters for some Ed Wood movies. Wood has had a virtually irrelevant presence in México and Latin America and most people were not even aware of his movies until the 1994 Tim Burton movie, which played often on cable. However, there are some small things to discuss.

In your post, you speculated that Plan 9 from Outer Space probably had a Spanish dub. This is probably not the case. Movies around that time were not actually dubbed into Spanish, at least not for the most part. Mexicans had to watch movies subtitled, in their original language or just go to a similar-looking Mexican production. There is speculation regarding a possible Spanish dub of Plan 9, there are several accounts of people who swear they watched a Spanish version of the film. Supposedly, there was a dub made for it around the 1990s and the last time it was shown on TV was around the early 2000's in both Peru and Puerto Rico. I have seen the movie on Mexican public television but it was always subtitled.

There is an entry for Plan 9 in a wiki database for the dub industry in Mexico, in the entry, only Bela Lugosi is credited to have a dub actor. As you can see this is a problem because he doesn't talk in the film! So there's obviously no dubbing credit attributed to his character. The rest is empty.

As of now, the dub is considered lost media and there's no real way to confirm its existence. The closest thing we have to a Plan 9 Spanish dub was a clip from Night of the Creeps (1986) that showed the movie and the dubbing of the Tim Burton movie. Among Spanish speakers, dubbing is a big deal. We worship our dubbing actors. Not only that, but Spanish dubs made in Latin America are hard to come by when it comes to cult movies or even classic older films. These are often considered treasures.

We hope that the Plan 9 dub is eventually found. Weirder things have happened. We recently discovered two Larry Buchanan pictures in Spanish. Who knows what we will find in the future?

As a bonus, I will add that the Mexican horror/sci fi/wrestling movie Arañas Infernales (1966) features shots taken directly from Plan 9 from Outer Space, the flying saucer shots, and basically a whole scene from Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) (the dog scene). It's a fun film that I recommend to B-movie fanatics. You probably already know this but I thought I should mention it, just in case.

Thanks a lot for your work. I will certainly be looking forward to another entry in your blog.

Jordan later sent me an addendum concerning Peliculas Coloso (Colossal Films), the company that distributed Plan 9 in México. In my original article, I speculated that Plan 9 must've been the company's only release, but Jordan has evidence to the contrary. He says he's found Spanish lobby cards for Adventure Island (1947), Midnight Manhunt (1945), Double Exposure (1944) and La malquerida (1949), all from Peliculas Coloso.
Fascinating stuff, no?

Podcast Tuesday: "Frankie Avalon Live! (Without Annette)"

Henry Winkler and Frankie Avalon on Happy Days.
I've written about this before, but my musical education as a youth came from a collection of very worn 45 RPM singles I received from my mother, who in turn got them decades earlier from the jukebox at her parents' bar in Northern Michigan. So many weird, great '50s hits were in there, including Pat Boone's most rockin' song by far, "That's How Much I Love You." (No, really, give that song a chance.)
In addition to that deathless classic, Mom had records by Annette Funicello ("Tall Paul"), The Robins ("Cherry Lips"), Dodie Stevens ("Pink Shoe Laces"), Johnny Preston ("Running Bear'), Fats Domino ("Whole Lotta Lovin'"), Alvin and the Chipmunks ("The Chipmunk Song" and "Alvin's Harmonica"), and even Ray Anthony (the Peter Gunn theme b/w "Tango for Two"). These songs became the soundtrack to my childhood. I didn't understand why the other kids in the neighborhood didn't know them.
One of the records in my mother's collection was "Why" by Frankie Avalon, the last #1 hit of the 1950s. Mom would have been about 13 when it was a hit, exactly the right age to appreciate the swoony, squeaky clean romanticism of it. Mom and I bonded over our love of rock and pop hits from the '50s and early '60s and would frequently sing along to the oldies station on the car radio. The first compact disc I ever owned was an Art Laboe Oldies But Goodies compilation that included another Avalon classic, "Venus." (I made that purchase at my mother's suggestion and have listened to that album many hundreds of times sinceit's .)
"Why" and "Venus" have been burned into my brain for decades, and I've seen a few of Frankie Avalon's movies, like Grease (1978) and Skidoo (1968), plus a couple of those Beach Party movies he made with Annette. But I can't say I've ever given much thought to the cultural phenomenon that is Francis Thomas Avallone. Decent enough singer and actor, but why did he briefly become such a cultural sensation? Why was he a cultural touchstone for my mom's generation? What was it about this guy?
This week on the Happy Days podcast, we're reviewing "Poobah Doo Dah," a 1982 episode guest starring Frankie Avalon himself. Yes, Frankie and the Fonz are together at last! Does this make for a classic? Find out this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 138: "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy (Featuring the Notorious T.O.R.)" (2022)

Criswell in "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy."
How did you spend the last day of 2022? I spent it remixing the theme music from Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Let me explain.
For a while now, I've been wanting to do an article about Trevor Duncan's "Grip of the Law," the dramatic, instantly recognizable composition we hear during the title sequence of Plan 9. Presumably it was music supervisor Gordon Zahler, not Ed Wood personally, who chose this bit of stock music. Nevertheless, this recording has become practically synonymous with Ed. When that iconic title card reading "Written-Produced-Directed by EDWARD D. WOOD, JR." appears on the screen—arguably the high point of Ed Wood's career—it's Duncan's music on the soundtrack.
English composer Trevor Duncan.Like many examples of so-called "library" or "production" music, "Grip of the Law" has been used in numerous movies, radio shows, and TV series since the '50s—mainly British ones, I should point out, since Duncan was an Englishman who worked directly for the BBC. Outside of Plan 9, the most prominent use of "Grip of the Law" in America was probably Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), though I fondly remember hearing it on one of Bob & Ray's radio shows, too.
Anyway, I was listening to "Grip of the Law" on repeat recently while trying to figure out what I wanted to say about the darned thing. As an amateur musician, my instinct was to tap my toe to the beat. That's when I noticed something odd: "Grip of the Law" does not have a standard 4/4 rhythm like most popular music. I might be embarrassing myself here (and I'm sure more knowledgeable musicians will be quick to correct me), but it sounds like it's in 5/8, a la John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) theme. The song is off-kilter. It keeps the listener feeling unbalanced.
Just as an experiment, I decided to build a standard 4/4 loop around some string parts from "Grip of the Law." This took some trial and error, but eventually I pieced together a convincing 4/4 loop that was still recognizable as the Plan 9 theme. Then, apparently having nothing better to do, I kept adding parts to it, mainly horn hits, until I had a piece of music that ran a little over a minute. To that, I added an 80 BPM (beats per minute) drum loop.
The track still didn't feel "complete" to me, so I added some second-hand vocals to it. The monologue at the beginning ("Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time..") comes from "Maggot Brain," a classic 1971 track by Funkadelic. The rest of the vocals come from "Dead Wrong" by The Notorious B.I.G. I chose this track for a couple of reasons—the ghoulish title, most obviously, and the fact that it was released posthumously on the Born Again (1999) album. I suppose I saw a parallel between Ed Wood patching together a Bela Lugosi movie and Bad Boy Records patching together a Biggie Smalls album.
Was I done yet? Nope. I still needed to make a video for the track. My video-editing skills are limited at best, but I did what I could with some borrowed clips from Plan 9. And thus was born "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy (Featuring the Notorious T.O.R.)." That title, by the way, is a reference to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, aka the home of The Notorious B.I.G.
I realize this is a lot of explanation for a silly, minute-long video, but sometimes I feel like overexplaining myself. Here's the video, if you haven't seen it. Enjoy or don't. Either way, it's free. (Remember, you get what you pay for.)

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 25: Seinfeld, "The Postponement" (1995)

Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Richards, and an unknown extra on Seinfeld.
Some advent calendars last 24 days, others 25. Technically, the season of advent ends on Christmas Eve, so my obligation to this verkakte series ended yesterday. However, as it happens, the weather this Christmas weekend has stranded me in my apartment with little to do, so you're getting a 25th day of Ed-Vent. Lucky you.
On the third day of this series , I reviewed "The Chinese Restaurant," a 1991 episode of NBC's Seinfeld in which the characters attempt to attend a one-night-only showing of Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) but do not succeed. Unfolding in real time in one location, this highly unusual episode proved to be a turning point in the sitcom's history. It also gave Ed's most famous film some of its most mainstream exposure ever. That Seinfeld has been seen by millions of people for over 30 years. Surely, at least some of those viewers must have been curious enough to track down Plan 9.
Running gags and callbacks were the lifeblood of Seinfeld, so it's not surprising that the show eventually returned to Plan 9 in an episode called "The Postponement." It took four and a half years, though, and those were four and a half eventful years. When "The Chinese Restaurant" debuted, Seinfeld was struggling through its second season, barely avoiding cancellation. By the time "The Postponement" aired on September 28, 1995, Seinfeld was in its seventh season and one of the most popular shows on television, airing as part of NBC's powerhouse Thursday night lineup alongside other smash hits like Friends and E/R.
In some ways, "The Postponement" shows how Seinfeld had evolved from its primitive early days. The iconic wraparound segments with Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) performing standup comedy had mostly been jettisoned, for instance. Starting with the 1994 episode "The Big Salad," the show started filming more outdoor scenes on the famed New York Street set at CBS Studio Center in Los Angeles. Now, instead of showing Jerry doing standup, Seinfeld preferred to show its characters walking down that gloriously fake New York street, chatting about trivial matters. "The Postponement" has numerous little moments like that. In fact, it's one of those New York walk-and-talk scenes that leads to the Ed Wood/Plan 9 content in "The Postponement." 
Jerry and Kramer spot a Plan 9 flyer on a lamppost.
Throughout the episode, Jerry and his neighbor Kramer (Michael Richards) squabble over a couple of very silly issues. First, Jerry is shocked when Kramer says he'd turn Jerry in to the police if he committed a murder. ("Who's to say I wouldn't be next?" Kramer reasons.) Secondly, Jerry is annoyed that Kramer has been drinking so many café lattes recently. They're walking down the street one day, debating that second issue, when Jerry spies a flyer for another one-night-only showing of Plan 9. Kramer agrees to go with him, but when they get to the theater, Kramer tries to sneak in a café latte—a direct violation of the venue's strictly-enforced "no outside drinks" rule. When Kramer spills his latte and is caught by an usher, Jerry is only too happy to rat him out. In classic Seinfeld fashion, Jerry and Kramer's two seemingly unrelated problems have intersected.
I had a strong memory of the Plan 9 references in "The Chinese Restaurant," but I had no recollection of the Plan 9 material in "The Postponement." Revisiting the latter, I understand why. The Jerry/Kramer story, while quite funny, is a minor subplot. The main plot has a panicked George (Jason Alexander) using emotional manipulation to delay his upcoming marriage to his sensible girlfriend Susan (Heidi Swedberg). There's also a related story in which Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) confesses her romantic problems to the seemingly friendly Rabbi Glickman (Bruce Mahler), only to be mortified when he blabs Elaine's secrets to everyone he knows. (To make matters worse, Rabbi Glickman has a cable TV show where he embarrasses both Elaine and George.)
While screening "The Postponement," written by Larry David and directed by Andy Ackerman, I realized how serialized and insular Seinfeld had become by its seventh season, almost like a soap opera. Most obviously, George and Susan's rocky romantic relationship is a sprawling, tragicomic saga that spans several seasons. This "postponement" kerfuffle is just one of many, many problems they had over the years. Meanwhile, the café latte incident at the movie theater sets up a Kramer story in a future episode. And Elaine and Kramer discuss the events of a previous Seinfeld in which they team up to kill an annoying dog. While "The Postponement" pretty much works as a standalone story, it's more enjoyable to viewers who are very familiar with Seinfeld's characters and ongoing plotlines. It's like the middle movie in a trilogy.
Arguably, "The Postponement" features as much or even more Plan 9 content than "The Chinese Restaurant." First, there is the flyer that Jerry spies on a lamp post while talking about lattes with Kramer. It leads to this dialogue:

JERRY: Hey, look at this! Plan 9 from Outer Space is playing tomorrow night! One show only!
KRAMER: I've always wanted to see this.
JERRY: Y'know, I was supposed to see this five years ago. I was in a Chinese restaurant with George and Elaine, and we got all screwed up trying to get a table, and we missed it.
KRAMER: Yeah, well, let's do it, huh?
JERRY: All right.

The flyer itself is kind of neat. Plan 9 is said to be playing at the Paragon Theater for "one evening only" on September 22, 1995. (That would have been a Friday, which makes sense.) The title of the movie is printed in what appears to be Hobby Headline font in a pinkish-purplish hue with a picture of the planet Saturn in the background. We see at least three copies of the flyer in the episode, so presumably there must be more copies in the vast Seinfeld archives somewhere.
A few scenes later, Kramer and Jerry are waiting in line outside the Paragon Theater, still debating the café latte matter, and we get to see the iconic Plan 9 from Outer Space poster on the wall behind them. This particular Paragon must be a repertory house, since the other posters we can see are all for classic movies, including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and The Long, Long Trailer (1953). I suppose the other extras waiting in line are all there to see Plan 9, which is nice. The movie has garnered a decent turnout, probably due to the interest stirred in Ed by the Oscar-winning biopic Ed Wood (1994), which had only been released on VHS  a few months before this episode.
These newly-converted Ed Wood fans are a sedate-looking bunch. The only potential weirdo among them is an intense-looking guy who wears his shoulder-length blonde hair combed straight back and carries a paperback book in the pocket of his sport coat. I've definitely seen guys like this at Ed Wood marathons. Good thing the Paragon doesn't have a policy against bringing in outside literature.
An intense extra (far right) attends Plan 9 on Seinfeld.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 24: With every Christmas card I write...

One of Ed Wood's Christmas cards, with Ed himself as Jesus.
Thanks in large part to Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), Ed Wood's homemade Christmas cards from the early '50s have taken on something of a mythical status among his fans. On page 34 of the book, Grey includes three vintage photographs: two glamour shots of actress Dolores Fuller in an angora sweater and one picture of Ed himself, incongruously dressed as Jesus Christ, complete with a long-haired wig and a glued-on beard. The caption is equally intriguing: "Ed Wood's 3-D Christmas Card, featuring Ed as the Jewish carpenter."
It turns out that this amazing image is part of a series of Christmas cards that Ed had printed when he was dating Dolores, circa Glen or Glenda (1953) and Jail Bait (1954). The actress talks about those cards on page 33: "We made up a 3-D Christmas card where I was the Virgin Mary. We had some children around. Ed wanted to recreate the nativity scene. We sent those Christmas cards out with 3-D glasses. Ed played Jesus Christ."
Philip Chamberlin, who eventually married Dolores Fuller, adds this: "In a way, the Christmas cards are kind of a parable. He was, no doubt, a martyr for his art."
A few pages later, actor John Andrews—the source of many of Nightmare's most colorful (and disputed) anecdotes—talks about how Eddie was sharing an apartment with his early creative partner, Alex Gordon. "I think they were the original odd couple," Andrews muses. Anyway, Alex got scared off by the wild drag parties Eddie was always throwing and moved out. Here, I'll just let John tell the story from there:
John Andrews talks about Ed Wood selling Christmas cards.
Bob Hope shills for Stereo Realist.Pretty wild stuff, huh? First off, the fact that this anecdote is taking place in December brings to mind that dreadful December in 1978 when Ed and his wife Kathy were evicted from their Yucca Flats apartment. That was often a rough month for him, which may be why there are so few Christmas references in Ed's work.
I've always assumed that the cards Eddie was selling were the same ones he'd made with Dolores Fuller, so maybe he made them for commercial rather than strictly personal reasons. Also, if John Andrews can be believed, this is how Ed Wood supposedly met actor Tom Tyler, who appeared in Eddie's Crossroad Avenger (1953) near the very end of his life. 
In her 2009 autobiography A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood and Me, Dolores Fuller gives us some more details about the history of those cards:

There are those who scoff at the idea that Eddie was in any sense a creative artist, but during my years with him, I was surprised almost daily by his creativity. One example that comes to mind is the series of five 1954 Christmas cards he created. I had been a 3-D enthusiast for many years and had my own "Stereo Realist" camera, made by Kodak, but discontinued in the early 1960's. It was a time when 3-D was enjoying one of its periodic fads, so we decided to go all out and make a series of tableau-like 3-D cards. 

The shoot was done at my two-bedroom Burbank home where Eddie and I lived with my father. The series of 3-D shots for the cards utilized our entire "family" and ranged thematically from a naughty shot of me in an abbreviated Santa costume for a card inscribed "... the night before Christmas," through a card with my father as "Santa Claus" toting a big toy-stuffed sack and son Darrell reaching excitedly for one of them, to a nativity scene in the stable with friends as the three wise men, Eddie as Joseph and myself as the Holy Mother, to a stunning shot of Eddie as a mature, bearded Jesus, arms outstretched in supplication and the inscription "...lo, I am with you always..."

That passage gives us a lot of details about when, where, and how those cards were made. The Stereo Realist was the most popular stereo camera of its era, but it was actually made by the David White Company and lasted until 1971. If Dolores is correct that these cards were made in 1954, that shoots my theory to hell because Tom Tyler died of a heart attack in May of that year. Could it be that this story actually happened in 1953?
And what about the other cards that Dolores mentioned, like the one with her as Mary or the one with her as a sexy Santa? Blessedly, some of these did survive into the 21st century. Circa 2002, an Ebay user named Toddhackett sold a set of the cards for an undisclosed price. Thanks to that auction, we have some some images of what the cards looked like. 
Ed and Dolores pose for Christmas cards circa 1954.
Back in 2015, Ed Wood scholar Philip R. Fry, the man behind this very useful website , posted to Facebook a list of the cards in this series and what each one contained.
3D Card Co., No. 501: "...lo, I am with you always..." This is the one with Ed Wood as Jesus with his arms outstretched.3D Card Co., No. 502: "...come to the stable..." This one is the nativity scene with the three wise men in the upper left corner.3D Card Co., No. 503: "...blessed is she..." This is the one with Dolores as Mary and Ed Wood as Joseph.3D Card Co., No. 504: This still-missing card is presumably the one with Dolores' father as Santa Claus. No images of it have surfaced yet.3D Card Co., No. 505: "...the night before Christmas..." This is the one with Dolores in her "abbreviated" Santa costume.
Perhaps the 3D Card Co. was the company that manufactured these five cards. Or it was some short-lived venture that Ed Wood launched specifically for this project. Either way, I can find no other reference to such a firm existing in the 1950s. What we've been looking at so far, by the way, have been the interiors of the cards. The exteriors are pretty generic: the words "Season's Greetings" printed in green on a plain white background. I'm guessing that the printer would allow you to customize the insides of the cards, but the outsides were standard. I'm just glad that Ed Wood got to work his beloved ellipses into these cards at the beginning and end of every caption.
One last question: do any of the 3D effects actually work? Well, yes. Sort of. I have some red-blue glasses lying around, so I decided to give it a whirl. Card 501, the one of Ed as Jesus, works best. Those hands genuinely look like they're reaching out. I suppose Card 503, with Ed as Joseph and Dolores as Mary, works okay, too, since Joseph does look like he's closer to us than his wife. There's not much to say about Cards 502 and 505. Perhaps there's a bit of depth to these images... if you squint. 
And that's the story of Ed Wood's legendary 3D Christmas cards featuring himself as Jesus Christ. Before we leave this topic, I'd like to remind you that Ed's idol, friend, and star Bela Lugosi was himself cast as Christ in a 1909 passion play.  Thanks to that production, we have numerous incredible images of Count Dracula as the Lamb of God, some of them quite similar to Eddie's Christmas card.
Yes, that's Bela Lugosi as Jesus Christ.
Isn't the internet wonderful sometimes? Merry Christmas to one and all.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 23: Ed Wood and the Eastbourne Defense

Ballard Barclay and Bruce Boa on Fawlty Towers.
There's a classic 1979 episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers—and don't worry, I'll circle back to Ed Wood eventually—called "Waldorf Salad" in which a brash, demanding American named Mr. Hamilton (Bruce Boa) stays at the titular hotel and clashes with its harried innkeeper, Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), over nearly everything. Basil deals with Hamilton as he does with all troublesome guests: with a curious mixture of hostility, insincere toadying, and needlessly elaborate lies and excuses. Eventually, Hamilton stages a revolt of all the unsatisfied guests, right there in the lobby of the hotel.
"What I'm suggesting," Hamilton shouts for all to hear, "is that this place is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!"
At this point, the Major (Ballard Barclay), an elderly gentleman who actually lives at Fawlty Towers and who might reasonably take some pride in his home, steps forward to object.
"No!" he interjects. "No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne."
The joke here is that, in the Major's estimation, Fawlty Towers is only the second crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe. But isn't that actually worse than being the worst? If you have no chance of being good, wouldn't you want to be the absolute bottom of the barrel? There's a certain pride in that.
In sticking up for Ed Wood or his films, many fans use what I call "the Eastbourne Defense." That's when you say something can't possibly be the worst of its kind because there are some that are even worse. What about The Room (2003), they say? Or Robot Monster (1953)? Or Troll 2 (1990)? Or some perfectly competent blockbuster they saw recently and didn't like?
To me, this is no defense at all. That's why the Major's line in "Waldorf Salad" is funny. It's the most backhanded of backhanded compliments. Nobody wants to be second worst or sixth worst or fifteenth worst. That's why I'm perfectly fine with Edward D. Wood, Jr. being "the worst director all time" and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) being "the worst film of all time." Even if neither one is true.
You've gotta wonder about that place in Eastbourne, though, huh? What is that place like? The mind boggles.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 22: Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)

Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)
Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)This'll be a quickie, I promise. There's almost not enough to warrant an article here, but I wanted to point something out to you.
In the early '90s, around the same time I stumbled upon Danny Peary's Cult Movies (1981), I discovered another strange book that changed my mind forever: Robert Anton Wilson's Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992). Would you believe it was at the same bookstore? That's right. Young & Welshans in Flint, Michigan. I believe that building is an Outback Steakhouse now. 
Robert Anton Wilson was... well, it's tough to describe what he was. Sci-fi author, psychologist, guru, and intergalactic wiseguy. Imagine a hybrid of Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He was too intellectually rambunctious to be contained by any one category or genre, so his career went in a lot of different directions simultaneously. (Kind of like Ed Wood's, now that I think of it.) 
Reality—its title inspired by a quote from another visionary fruitcake, Hunter S. Thompson—is one of Robert's many oddball projects to manifest itself over the years. It's presented as "an illustrated screenplay," but it's a script that's meant to be read, not produced. Still with me? To make things even more convoluted, Wilson has added a framing device wherein this unproduced screenplay has been discovered by academics in the distant future. They're puzzling over this artifact from a strange and primitive time, i.e. the 1990s.
But what of the script itself? Well, it's a rapid-fire montage of short (sometimes very short) scenes, all flowing into and out of each other like a dream or a particularly surreal Monty Python episode. Imagine if you got very stoned one night and started flipping through all the channels on your TV. Except that your perception of reality is skewed, so you imagine the characters in movies, TV shows, and commercials saying all kinds of unlikely things. 
If it were actually produced, Reality is What You Can Get Away With would consist of some wholly original footage, plus a generous helping of stock footage and clips from various movies. Those clips would be dubbed with new comedic dialogue, a la What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) or Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985-86). (The future academics I mentioned have a hell of a time understanding this aspect of the script.)
Among the movies Wilson would have ransacked: The Phantom Planet (1961), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), The Third Man (1949), The Outlaw (1943), The Thief of Baghdad (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Woman in Green (1945), Crack in the Mirror (1960), and Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Eddie would be glad to know that two of his cinematic idols, Orson Welles and Jane Russell, play important roles in the film.
Throughout the screenplay, Wilson draws on the iconography of old, cheap science-fiction movies, so it's only natural that there should be some Ed Wood in the mix. The Plan 9 content, however, is fleeting. Early on, the film's protagonist, Ignatz Ratskiwatski, watches a film called Plan 3 from Outer Space on television. 
Much later in the script, Wilson includes a clip from Plan 9 featuring chiropractor Tom Mason filling in for the late Bela Lugosi. The book is heavily illustrated with photos, so I wanted to show you a scanned page from Reality including a picture of Dr. Tom:
A page from Reality.
Wilson's script includes the Plan 9 scene in which the Ghoul Man (Bela Lugosi/Tom Mason) enters the Trents' house and scares Paula Trent (Mona McKinnon) while she's in bed. Paula, identified in Reality merely as a "housewife," rises in terror. But the Ghoul Man, identified as a chiropractor, reassures her with this iconic line: "It's okay, I don't have an erection." (Erection jokes are a motif throughout the script.) Paula then dashes out of the house and into the cemetery, where she promptly runs into Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, who asks to borrow "some sugar... and maybe a few lines of coke." Wilson then cuts to some novelty bumper stickers (including "Campus Crusade for Cthulu").
And that's it. That's the extent of the Ed Wood content in Reality is What You Can Get Away With. It's not much, I understand, but I think it's noteworthy that a major author like Robert Anton Wilson would draw from Plan 9, however briefly, in one of his strangest and most memorable books.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 21: A few more pages from Ed Wood's The Hostesses (1973)

How similar is The Hostesses to The Cocktail Hostesses? We'll get to the bottom of this.
Once again, I'm leafing through some pages from Ed Wood's softcore script The Hostesses, which director-producer Stephen C. Apostolof filmed as The Cocktail Hostesses (1973). As you'll recall from yesterday's article, the film revolves around a young woman named Toni Rice (played by Rene Bond), an unhappy secretary who's having an affair with her skinflint married boss, Mr. Henderson (Norman Fields). At the behest of her friend Jackie (Terri Johnson), Toni quits this job and becomes a cocktail hostess and escort.
We now jump forward a little in the story. Toni is working at an Irish-themed bar alongside Jackie and another girl named Lorraine. (This copy of the script belongs to the actress playing Lorraine, by the way, which is why her lines are underlined.) 
Howard (Duane Paulsen), the bar's piano player, has $50 in his tip jar and offers it to Lorraine if she'll have sex with him after work. Lorraine begs off, saying she has to drive Jackie home. Howard has another suggestion: they can both have sex with him. Here's how that conversation goes:
Page 21 of The Hostesses.
Comparing this script page to the finished movie, we find that Jackie and Howard's conversation is almost identical to what Ed Wood has written. Howard even does that  dumb "double your pleasure" bit, a reference to the ad campaign for Wrigley's Doublemint gum. But, alas, Duane Paulsen skips one exceptionally corny line of Wood's dialogue: "I have enough lovin' for both of you." As before, Ed Wood has left the explicitness of the sex scene "to the discretion of the director." Steve Apostolof was strictly a softcore filmmaker, so he would not include graphic, unsimulated sex scenes in his movies.
Let's move on to page 29, where we find Lorraine consoling another waitress, Millie (Lynn Harris), who has recently been raped in the parking lot of the bar. Keep in mind that they're having this heart-to-heart conversation in the middle of a hotel room orgy, with a nude couple making out right behind them.
Page 29 of The Hostesses.
In The Cocktail Hostesses, the actresses do what's on the page, though they tinker with the wording just a little bit. For instance, Millie's line about the knife, "I should have had a knife like he did," becomes "Listen, I wish I had the knife he had" in the finished movie. Luckily, Ed Wood's speech about men being "bastards" survived intact to the final cut. Also, it should be noted that once the girls go to the bedroom for some privacy, they improvise some inconsequential chit-chat about the party and the drinks before resuming the scripted dialogue.
Another interesting line from Eddie's script: "There is no doubt but what LORRAINE is the aggressor." Revealing choice of words, no? That's how Ed Wood saw lesbian relationships, i.e. predator and prey. In the movie, however, this dynamic is not played up.
The Millie/Lorraine scene continues on page 30:
Page 30 of The Hostesses.
In this scene, Lorraine seduces Millie. Pay close attention to those handwritten notes in the margin, for here we finally get confirmation that Steve Apostolof freely encouraged his actresses to ad lib. The actress playing Lorraine has written in the lower right corner: "Scene to be played with extreme erotic ad-libs. Choice of words & language no barrier." I'd have to guess that this advice came directly from Steve Apostolof to his actresses. 
Generally, throughout this sequence, the two actresses read Eddie's lines but improvise some brief dialogue along the way, mostly as a way of filling up time. Other than that, page 30 of Ed's script has survived nicely.
This very same scene continues on page 31:
Page 31 of The Hostesses.
For this page, the main difference between the script and the movie is that, in the latter, there are several lengthy cutaways during Lorraine's two big speeches. (Those are the passages underlined in purple in the picture above.) After Lorraine says the part about "their own selfish pleasures" (ignoring the "little" from Ed's script), she improvises a few extra lines while undressing Millie. At that point, Steve Apostolof cuts to the living room, where all the other characters, including Toni and Jackie, are engaged in an orgy. There's an amusing moment when a character named Larry (played by Apostolof regular Harvey Shain) canoodles on a couch with the profoundly bosomy Candy Samples. Nice work if you can get it. 
Steve then cuts back to the bedroom with Millie and Lorraine, and the latter resumes her speech, starting with the part about "their little demands." After she says a couple more sentences, Steve goes back to the living room, then back again to Millie and Lorraine, who picks up with: "And there will always come a time when..." (Ed's script has this as "always be a time when...")
The final page I have from the script is page 41, which is the last page of this draft. What's happening here is that Toni has gone back to work for Henderson—not as his secretary but as his paid mistress. At her old salary, yet! Here's how Ed Wood has it in the script:
Page 41 (and the end) of The Hostesses.
Yet again, the actors (Rene Bond and Norman Fields) kind of dance around Eddie's dialogue. If you want to see exactly what Ed wrote, look at the picture above. As for the dialogue in the finished movie, I've transcribed it below:

TONI: And what did I make?
HENDERSON: Uh, it's hard for me to remember.
TONI: I remember!
HENDERSON: Now what's that got to do with anything?
TONI: Plenty. You can visit me every Friday. And you can pay me eighty-six dollars and ninety-one cents for that visit. And that, my dear cocksman, is our permanent arrangement.

Apostolof wisely ends the scene (and the movie) with the "permanent arrangement" line. As you can see in the picture above, Eddie's script had one more line from Toni: "Now start making love... lover..." That's the kind of line Ed would have used in one of his short stories or novels, but it's a little too flowery to say out loud. I never really considered it until now, but I guess this "arrangement" allows Toni to keep her cocktail waitress job. After all, her sex sessions with Henderson generally happen during the afternoon, and the bar doesn't get hopping until nighttime.
All in all, this was an interesting little experiment. It helped me understand how Eddie wrote, how Ed and Steve worked together, how Ed's scripts compare to the films made from them, and even how Steve treated his actors and actresses. Now if someone will only give me the $1,450 for the complete Hostesses screenplay.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 20: Pages from Ed Wood's script for The Hostesses (1973)

A detail from the Cocktail Hostesses poster.
What are you even doing here? Don't you realize that, at this very moment, you could be buying a genuine vintage screenplay for The Cocktail Hostesses (1973) for a mere $1,450? Talk about a bargain! You remember The Cocktail Hostesses, right? The Ed Wood-written, Steve Apostolof-directed softcore film that's so widely beloved that it's never received a proper DVD release, not even as part of the Big Box of Wood collection? Right, that's the one. Your Christmas won't be complete without it!
Jokes aside, it's difficult for me to get terribly enthused about The Cocktail Hostesses, even though I coauthored an entire book about its director. Back in 2020 , I said it was only my 35th favorite Ed Wood movie and my least favorite of the Wood-Apostolof collaborations. Why is that? Although I'm always glad to see the late, great Rene Bond in a leading role, The Cocktail Hostesses is so sleazy and sordid—not to mention marred by a totally gratuitous rape scene—that I find it too depressing to be much fun.
Still in all, if someone gifted me that $1,450 Cocktail Hostesses script, complete with handwritten notes by one of the actresses in the film, I'd probably die of happiness. There's no way in this world I could ever afford it. Luckily, some snapshots have been posted online. How about we take a look at them and see if we find anything interesting, huh? We'll start with the cover page.
The cover of The Hostesses.
Okay, right away we see that The Cocktail Hostesses was originally called just The Hostesses and its script was credited solely to Ed Wood. In the completed film's end credits, Steve Apostolof (as A.C. Stephen) is listed as the film's coauthor. (How much writing Steve actually did on this picture, I don't know. My guess is, not much apart from maybe giving Ed Wood a story outline.) Note, too, that the film has been given a production number: "Prod. #113."
This particular copy of the script seems to have belonged to someone named "Kriss Kross," who is playing the supporting role of Lorraine. In the finished film, this character is portrayed by model-actress Kathy Hilton (1947-2015). Kathy is known to have worked under various aliases, so perhaps "Kriss" is one of them. In any event, Steve Apostolof filmed The Cocktail Hostesses in October 1972. We can see that the dates written on this cover match up with the calendar. (October 22 was a Sunday that year.)
It looks like this actress has been asked to show up at a place identified only as "Reubans" at 3:00 in the morning. Apostolof's usual cinematographer, Robert Caramico, shot The Cocktail Hostesses under the name "R.C. Ruben," so perhaps this note refers to him. Also, I'm pretty sure our actresses has been asked to supply her own red party dress, presumably for the late night orgy scene.
Next is merely a title page:
The title page of The Hostesses.
Not much to say here, except it's amusing to me that a script for a low-budget softcore porn movie should have both a cover and a title page. Talk about formality! Note, too, that The Hostesses is listed as "An A. - A. PRODUCTIONS Presentation." This is the production company name Steve Apostolof used for both Drop Out Wife (1972) and The Cocktail Hostesses, though both were released under the SCA banner.
At last, we get to the good stuff, i.e. the first scene of the picture:  
Page 1 of The Hostesses.
What happens on this page is basically what happens in the finished movie. Young secretary Toni Rice (Rene Bond) makes love to her boss, Mr. Henderson (Norman Fields), in the latter's office. Once they finish, they start dressing and have a little conversation about their relationship.
In the final cut of the movie, Steve Apostolof adds an establishing shot of the office building that's not indicated in Ed's script. Also, while dressing, Rene Bone improvises an extra line to fill up the time: "Boy, it's been a long day!" (This ends up being the first line of the film, apart from some grunts during the sex scene.) Other than that, there's no real difference between page and stage, so to speak.
Twice on just this page, Eddie leaves some detail "to the discretion of the director." That was a common notation in his screenplays for Steve Apostolof, perhaps indicating the writer's level of respect for his director and patron. For one thing, Ed says that Steve can decide how much of Mr. Henderson's naked body to reveal. As it happens, actor Norman Fields (whom I don't think of as "ruggedly handsome") does appear fully frontally nude in the finished movie.
The scene continues:
Page 2 of The Hostesses.
Not much to note here. Rene Bond and Norman Fields deliver this dialogue pretty much as Ed Wood wrote it, though they make it a little more natural and conversational by changing a word here and there. The essential meaning is kept intact. They do skip the "until next Friday" part entirely, though.
We now jump forward a few pages in the script:
Page 5 of The Hostesses.
Toni is now bemoaning her fate to her friend Jackie (gap-toothed Terri Johnson). She's sick of earning just $86.91 a week to be "poked, probed, sodomized, and debauched." (Never the most accurate of typists, Ed misspells the last one as "debached.") Jackie tells her to ditch that office job and become a cocktail waitress/escort. 
Again, the actresses largely deliver what Ed Wood has written. But Rene Bond does give her own spin on the "sick and tired" rant. Here's what she says in the finished movie:

I'm sick and tired of it... and all for what? NOTHING, just nothing! Them with their wife and kids, and all I get out of it is a big zero. Being a secretary is rotten. I just get nothing out of it.

Terri Johnson's response is also a little different from what's on the page:

"I'd say it's about time. You keep screwin' with that boss of yours and for what? Absolutely nothing! You figure it this way. I made thirty dollars alone in tips last night. And afterwards, I had the most delightful time with an out-of-town buyer. He made me fifty dollars richer."

See what I mean? Compare those quotes to the script page, and you'll see that what they're saying is similar to what Eddie wrote but not exactly the same. Maybe Steve Apostolf gave his actors seem leeway when it came to dialogue. Maybe, if we want full-tilt, unfiltered Eddie, all of his screenplays are going to have to be published just as he typed them 50 years ago.
But this article has already gone too long. I'll be back tomorrow with a few more script pages and commentary from The Hostesses.