Joe Blevins's Blog, page 34

Podcast Tuesday: "Shady Acres, Grandma" or "You Dropped a Nussbaum on Me"

Frances Bey and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.
The backstory of ace mechanic and ladies' man Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) kept changing on Happy Days for the simple reason that no one behind the scenes had ever planned out who this character was, what he had been through, or what he would eventually do with his life. It all just sort of happened haphazardly over the course of 11 seasons, with the writers reinventing and redefining the character as they went along and retconning parts of his past as they deemed necessary. 
The character of Fonzie wasn't even part of Happy Days' original pilot in 1972. He was only added by network decree after the success of the movie American Graffiti (1973) and the stage musical Grease (1971). Those stories featured tough greaser dudes, they figured, so Happy Days should have one, too. In his early days, Fonzie had an air of mystery. He was a man of few words whose life was deliberately kept vague. But then, America fell in love with him, and we wanted to learn a lot more about him. The show obliged.
Eventually, some basic facts about Fonzie's past emerged from the ether. He had been abandoned by both his parents -- first his father, then his mother -- at an early age. How early? It varies from episode to episode. But it definitely happened. The writers are sure of that. At some point in his teen years, he struck out on his own and has been living independently ever since. 
In the 10-year interim between his abandonment and his independence, Fonzie was raised by his kindly Grandma Nussbaum. We actually got to meet this sweet, elderly caretaker in a classic 1975 episode called "Fonzie Moves In." Lillian Bronson played her in that show, then retired from acting after a 30-plus-year career. We didn't see much (or any) of Grandma Nussbaum for a few seasons after that, but Fonzie frequently mentioned her and kept her alive in our imaginations.
Finally, in Season 9, we got a whole episode about Grandma Nussbaum, appropriately titled "Grandma Nussbaum." With Lillian Bronson unavailable, the role went to Canadian character actress Frances Bey, who went on to numerous iconic film and TV roles in the decades that followed. You may know her from Seinfeld, The Middle, Happy Gilmore, or numerous David Lynch projects. Who knows? Maybe Happy Days was the big break Frances needed in her career.
Was it worth it to bring Grandma Nussbaum back onto our screens after nearly seven years? Find out on the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 19: Tor Johnson meets Peter Gunn (1960)

Tor Johnson on Peter Gunn in 1960.
Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson is thought of as one of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s stock players, thanks to his memorable roles in Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). There's even a (completely fictional) scene in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) suggesting that Eddie discovered Tor at a wrestling match in Los Angeles and recruited him to be in movies for the first time. However, the truth is that this gargantuan grappler worked in TV and film for decades, both before and after his professional association with Eddie.
Today, I'm going to spotlight a role that Tor played not long after filming Night of the Ghouls: an episode of the NBC detective show Peter Gunn called "See No Evil." It originally aired on February 1, 1960, and made such a strong impression on critic Danny Peary that he mentioned it in his 1981 review of Plan 9 from Outer Space . For the uninitiated, Peter Gunn ran for three seasons (1958-1961) and is largely remembered today for bringing producer/creator Blake Edwards together with composer Henry Mancini. The series' jazzy theme song is still a standard and has been covered by dozens of artists. When Edwards switched to making feature films, he continued to collaborate with Mancini on classics like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and The Pink Panther (1963).
Craig Stevens as Peter Gunn.For the most part, Peter Gunn is what you'd expect from a crime show of this vintage. The title character, as played by handsome but rather bland Craig Stevens, is a macho, cynical private eye in Eisenhower era Los Angeles. His contact on the police force is world-weary Lt. Jacoby (played by sourpuss Herschel Bernardi, looking like a man in need of a nap). Most fictional sleuths are defined by their quirks, but apart from his phallic name and his penchant for vaguely Bogart-esque quips, Gunn doesn't seem to have any. He's a straight arrow. In other episodes, Gunn hangs out at a jazz club and even dates a singer named Edie (played by Lola Albright), but none of this is in evidence during "See No Evil."
Peter Gunn may not have the most engaging protagonist in the world, but producer Blake Edwards compensates by making the series exceptionally stylish and atmospheric. We are firmly within the realm of film noir here. "See No Evil" has plenty of cockeyed camera angles, dramatic lighting effects, and swift, brutal acts of violence. Hell, two cops are matter-of-factly gunned down before we even get to the opening credits! And all through it, there is the unmistakable "cool" jazz of Henry Mancini in the background.
Look, I'll be honest and admit that I can never follow the plots of most detective and mystery shows. Even after the crime is "explained" to me at the end, I'm always a little confused as to who did what to whom and why. What I can tell you about "See No Evil" is that the plot is set in motion when a sleazy, mustachioed gangster named Brenners (Lou Krugman) shoots his way out of a courthouse after being sentenced to 60 years in the slammer for racketeering. Soon after, a blind news dealer named Cliffie (Walter Burke) hires Peter for protection. He testified against Brenners years ago and figures the crook will want to kill him in revenge. He's right. A few scenes in, Peter finds Cliffie dead—not just dead but mangled. Who or what could've done this? (Ed Wood fans may have some idea.)
As in just about every detective story, our hero goes to various places and interviews various people in search of the truth. I couldn't always tell what these folks had to do with the story. A sizable part of the episode, for example, is given over to some unhelpful switchboard operators who won't give Gunn or Jacoby the information they want about a payphone call that so-and-so placed to whatshisname. There's even a car chase at one point, though I wasn't sure why or where it was happening. Eventually, in the last 10 minutes, we get to the good part: Peter's investigations lead him to a creepy place called Sunview Sanitarium. No points for guessing that this joint is neither sunny nor sanitary.
Peter enters this Arkham-esque facility and is promptly thrown into a padded room by the gangsters. Our hero starts devising an escape when Brenners himself, flanked by lieutenants, enters the room. They share this supremely hard-boiled dialogue, neither one betraying much emotion:

GUNN: Hello, Brenners.
BRENNERS: Better make that goodbye.
GUNN: Oh, I don't know. A lot of people are looking for you.
BRENNERS: You made the mistake of finding me.
GUNN: And you made the mistake of killing Cliffie Thomas.
BRENNERS: That right?
GUNN: Police found him pretty well mangled. What did you use on him?

BRENNERS: You're gonna find out.

Brenners flashes a sly smirk, then coolly exits Peter's cell and walks over to another one down the hall somewhere. He opens an ominous-looking iron door and out steps a monster: some huge barefoot creature wearing only baggy, striped pajamas. This behemoth lumbers down the hall, with director Alan Crosland, Jr. being careful only to show him from the knees down at first. Once this unknown threat reaches Peter Gunn's cell, the camera tilts up to reveal that it's Tor Johnson, who lunges toward our hero in attack mode. (Tor's character is identified as "Bruno" in the end credits, but this name is never said aloud during the episode.) What ensues is essentially a steel-cage wrestling match, and now we can understand the beauty of having this scene take place in a padded cell. Tor can toss Craig Stevens around without the actor sustaining any serious damage. Just when all seems lost, Lt. Jacoby shows up and shoots Tor dead, though it takes five shots (by my count) to bring the big boy down. Gunn and Jacoby exchange some more terse, cynical dialogue and stagger out of the padded room. The end.
I can easily imagine why "See No Evil" would have imprinted itself on the memories of viewers for decades. For the first two-thirds, it's your typical TV detective show, perhaps a bit more stylized than most. Then it suddenly becomes Chiller Theatre. Shifting the action to Sunview Sanitarium is a rather outrageous conceit on the part of the writers (the story itself is credited to Blake Edwards), and then the addition of Tor Johnson takes the episode into the world of pure fantasy. I was reminded of the Rancor scene from Return of the Jedi (1983), though viewers in 1960 probably thought of Daniel in the lions' den.
To be fair, the bonkers plot twist in "See No Evil" is somewhat telegraphed. In the early, more cheerful stages of the episode, Gunn's investigations take him to a dingy-looking gym where a funny little man named Igor (the ubiquitous Benny Rubin) is impatiently choreographing a female wrestling match. This scene exists purely for comic relief, however, and does not hint that Gunn himself will soon end up wrestling for his life.
This episode of Peter Gunn is something that all Ed Wood fans will want to see, if they haven't already. It's always a pleasure to watch Tor in anything, and it's especially nice to see him in a classy, respectable network TV show rather than a grade-Z programmer for a change. I'm sure Eddie watched "See No Evil" (if his TV weren't in hock that week) and just as sure that he loved it. In his films, short stories, and novels, Eddie favored square-jawed, ultra-manly heroes like Peter, and he made more than one attempt at film noir, complete with that rat-a-tat dialogue. I wouldn't say that he ever mastered the genre, but he made a couple of noble efforts. I think the finale of "See No Evil" would have blown his mind.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 18: Cult Movies (1981)

The book that changed my life. Maybe for the worse.
Sometime in my early adolescence, I devised a very handy method for finding the weird and outrageous movies I'd been craving all my life. I'd simply flip through video guides and look for all the one-star and zero-star reviews, making sure to note the titles, directors, and actors. This is how I found out about Herschel Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, John Waters, and, yes, Ed Wood. Armed with some promising leads, I'd head down to one of several video stores in the area and start hunting. (Or, failing that, I'd look through the TV listings to see what was playing in the wee small hours.)
The guru: Danny Peary.This strange technique of mine worked because, back then, movie critics were much more square and stodgy than they are today. In their reviews, they were generally aiming for what I'd call middlebrow respectability. (Think: Merchant-Ivory films. Classy but not too demanding.) They were allergic to the  kind of stuff I was looking for—trashy movies with lots of sex, violence, surrealism, and bad taste. But the authors of video guides reviewed everything, whether they wanted to or not. Learning about what they hated taught me about what I loved.
Then, in high school, I hit the motherlode. At the late, much-missed Young & Welshans bookstore in Flint, MI, I found a copy of Danny Peary's seminal 1981 tome, Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. Peary didn't even bother covering "normal" mainstream movies; his book was wall-to-wall weirdness. Just what I'd always wanted! And these weren't mere capsule reviews like I'd find in the video guides. These were lengthy, illustrated essays, complete with cast lists and plot summaries. The author would give a brief history of the film alongside analysis and commentary. I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven. 
While I had first seen Ed Wood's name in print in those video guides, it was Peary's Cult Movies, specifically his four-and-a-half-page essay about Plan 9 from Outer Space, that truly made me want to seek out Eddie's work. Without Danny's book, this series of articles (and possibly this entire blog) would never have happened. Who knows? I might be doing something profitable with my life today.
In those primitive, pre-internet, pre-streaming days, Danny Peary was a hero to an entire generation of information-starved film freaks who wanted to explore the world of offbeat cinema. The curmudgeonly critic was an unlikely tour guide, though, since he often seemed at odds with the material he was covering. My copy of Cult Movies, for instance, has this quote from Playboy emblazoned on the cover:

"Wild bunches of film freaks would brave the badlands of a forbidden planet for a compendium like this!" 

A nice thought, but Danny gave largely negative reviews to The Wild Bunch (1969), Badlands (1973), and even Forbidden Planet (1956). Of the films cited in that Playboy quote, only Freaks (1932) met with Peary's approval. Danny was no fan of H.G. Lewis, Russ Meyer, or John Waters either, and he had little affection for arguably the biggest cult movie of them all, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
So where does he stand on Ed Wood? I decided to revisit Peary's Plan 9 essay and find out. His cast and crew credits are accurate, as is his plot summary. No quibbles there. As for the essay part, we must remember that Cult Movies came out soon after Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), the book that crowned Ed Wood the worst director of all time and Plan 9 the worst film of all time. The popularity of the Golden Turkey book is the main reason Plan 9 is being covered in Cult Movies at all. Naturally, then, Peary largely follows the Medveds' lead and parrots a lot of what they had to say about Plan 9 being so cheap, flimsy, and ludicrous that it's perversely entertaining. 
If there's one line from Peary's essay that has stayed with me through the years, it's this one: "As bad as it is, Plan 9 is, except for about a hundred dull spots, a lot of fun." After screening the movie dozens of times for research purposes, I know what he means. For the most part, Peary points out the same continuity errors and silly dialogue that other critics point out, but there are a few examples that are unique to this essay. I'm sure, for instance, it was Peary who made me notice this underappreciated line from Rev. Lyn Lemon: "The bell has rung upon his great career." And Peary is the only critic in history to note that Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) "goes off on a several-day trip with a teeny overnight bag." I also like Cult Movies' description of the infamous cockpit set: "the type of set used by improv groups."
Along the way, Peary repeats some long-debunked canards about Ed Wood and his films, again getting his dubious information third-hand from the Medveds. No, Eddie did not storm an enemy beach in World War II while wearing a bra and panties under his uniform. And, no, the flying saucers in Plan 9 are not paper plates. But that's what people thought 40 years ago. Also, Paul Marco's character is Kelton, not Calvin, as Peary has it. 
Peary also floats the theory that perhaps Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi were working on two different movies at the end of Lugosi's life. He thinks the footage of Lugosi at his wife's funeral and the footage of Lugosi entering the Trents' house and frightening Paula (Mona McKinnon) are from separate projects. Interesting notion, but I don't know that there's evidence to support it.
Peary has some amusing comments about Ed Wood's stock players. Of Criswell, whom he compares to Billy Graham, he opines: "This man belongs in a booby hatch." Of Tor Johnson, he says: "This is the only time I recall he was trusted with dialogue. He is no Leslie Howard." (Peary also recalls Johnson's "exciting" guest role on a 1960 episode of Peter Gunn that I may have to check out. For the record, it's from the show's second season and is called "See No Evil.") His comments about Vampira are quite intriguing: "Her looks remind me a great deal of Carol Borland, Lugosi's costar in Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire (1935)—except that Borland has screen presence and Vampira just looks like she has anorexia." Unkindness of that remark aside, the connection to Borland is aptly noted. Browning even films Borland approaching the camera with her fingers extended, just the way Wood does with Vampira in Plan 9. And the physical resemblance—the pale skin, the dark lips, the long, straight hair—is uncanny.
Blood sisters: Carol Borland in Mark of the Vampire; Vampira in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Where the review really gets interesting for me is right at the end, where Danny Peary semi-archly suggests we have misinterpreted Ed Wood's movie all these years. "Could it be," Peary writes, "that putting up a crazy façade is the only way that Wood can get away with making a subversive movie?" After all, the author points out, this is a movie in which the U.S. government wrongly suppresses evidence of UFOs and aliens, prevents Jeff from reporting what he knows, and even covers up the destruction of an entire town. 
And Peary is one of the few critics who points out what I have long felt: that the snooty alien Eros (Dudley Manlove) is actually right, even though he's treated as a villain. "Only the fact that he has a diabolical laugh and a lot of conceit covers up that what he says to [the earthlings] makes sense." In reality, the nuclear arms race really has gotten out of control and could still lead to the end of the world. (We are currently 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock .) This passage, more than any other, turned me into an Ed Wood fan before I'd seen a second of any of his movies.
Danny Peary's Cult Movies is an important part of my past and a book that I hope fans will continue to rediscover for years to come. Its availability, apart from libraries, is a little dubious right now. You can read it and its 1983 sequel at The Internet Archive, though Cult Movies 3 (1989) is AWOL there. In the Kindle store, you can (and should) buy four short "samplers" that pull reviews from all three Cult Movies books. But used paperback and even hardback copies of those books are still out there on the secondary market for a reasonable price.
The Cult Movies book series didn't just come along at a pivotal time in my life; it came along at a pivotal time in the history of popular culture. In the 1980s, your home entertainment options were rather limited. You had the three major TV networks and maybe a few independent stations, plus AM/FM radio, and whatever magazines and newspapers happened to be available in your area. Your nearby movie theaters only had so many screens. Your local record stores and video stores only had so much shelf space. If you craved "weirdo" entertainment, you had to take it where you could get it. If you lived in Middle America, far from the big cities, an offbeat movie like Pink Flamingos (1972) or Eraserhead (1977) might seem like a miracle, as if you were receiving a coded message from a distant planet many light years away.

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

Not everything makes it onto this blog... until today, that is.
Jack Haley would scoff when people told him that being in The Wizard of Oz (1939) must've been "fun." He knew better. Wearing a stiff, stifling Tin Man costume under those hot MGM studio lights for hours at a stretch? That was no fun. That was work. "I couldn't even sit in it," he told writer Aljean Harmetz. "I could only lean against a reclining board." Haley did have moments of levity on the Oz set, especially while working with his longtime pal Bert Lahr, but making the beloved children's fantasy film was mostly a grueling experience for the actor.
Jack Haley, not having fun.I've sometimes felt like Jack Haley while working on this Ed Wood series over the course of the last nine years. At least Mr. Haley was paid for his labors. This has been entirely a labor of love for me. I've put in many hours of work, much of it tedious, and literally given away the results for free. I'm not even sure what has compelled me to keep going with this series—a desire to create something, I guess. But didn't I make some royalties off that Steve Apostolof book a couple of years ago? Yeah, just about enough to buy some laundry tokens. There's simply no money in this particular corner of film scholarship.
Sometimes, I have been less than gracious when fielding complaints or corrections from readers. I'm not proud of that, but I can't help it. There's one guy in particular—a self-styled "Hollywood historian" who frequents an Ed Wood group on Facebook—who always seems to have something negative to say about my work and who has been skeptical of every theory I have ever posited about Ed Wood. I suppose I should be grateful that he bothers to read my stuff at all and form an opinion about it, but mostly I just want him to come down with a mild case of bubonic plague. I thought adding a "big fat disclaimer" to the Ed Wood Wednesdays index page would silence the complainers, including my "historian" nemesis. It didn't. My message to them all remains the same: if you think you can do better, you probably can and should.
Greg Dziawer started contributing material to this series in 2015, and I'm very grateful for the amazing stuff he consistently manages to find, but that doesn't mean I work any less work on this blog. The formatting and copy-editing? That's still all me. Sometimes, Greg will send me a whole passel of pictures (many of which I have to censor) with only a skeletal outline of the text he wants to accompany them. It's up to me to put all that material into some kind of readable, coherent article.
Occasionally, Greg will tell me he's working on a particular article, so I'll start making a header image for it in advance. Here's an unused one for a piece he was writing about Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West, aka "The Hubba Hubba Girl," a legendary burlesque dancer who can be seen in the so-called "director's cut" of Jail Bait (1954) . The article never materialized, but I didn't want the header to go to waste.
Evelyn "Treasure Chest" West.
More controversially, Greg wanted to look into the career of Cotton Watts, the blackface performer whose extremely offensive and demeaning act can be seen in Jail Bait. Coincidentally, in that director's cut I mentioned earlier, the Evelyn West footage replaces the Cotton Watts footage. Here's the header I devised. It's meant to shock and provoke. That orange "Cotton Watts" logo is supposed to be reminiscent of Looney Tunes, by the way.
The notorious Cotton Watts.
Yet another unrealized Dziawer article was about Kent and the Candidates, the late 1960s/early 1970s rock group that contributed the theme song to  Mrs. Stone's Thing (1970) . I must have been really enthusiastic for this one, because I created multiple header images featuring the group's leader, Kent Sprague aka Kent Dubarri aka Butch Dubarri. Here's the one I probably would have used.
Kent Sprague of Kent and the Candidates.
And here's an alternate version, in case I wanted something more stylized/cartoony. Looks like I never got around to adding text to this one. Or maybe I was waiting for Greg to write the article, so I could put the title in that big blue space.
More of Kent Sprague.
Not all of my unused header images are for unfinished or unwritten articles. Sometimes, I'll just have a change of heart in the middle of the process and go in a different direction. Below, for instance, is some scrapped artwork for an episode of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast. You can see the image I actually used right here .
Greg Dziawer lurking in the shadows.
And, just for fun, here's some unused artwork I made for an article in Greg's "Magazine Orbit" series . I'm not sure why I created it in the first place or why I never used it. All I know is that I found it on my computer while doing research for this article and decided to present it to you. As with the Kent Sprague picture, I probably would have put some text in that big blue expanse.
Two gentlemen featured in Boy Friends magazine. Where are they now?
So that's it. Essentially, with this article, I wanted to clean house a little and give you some insight into how this blog is made. I realize this might all be self-indulgent, but what are the holidays for if we can't indulge ourselves a little from time to time? You're still free to send corrections and complaints to me, but maybe think about Jack Haley and his reclining board before you do.

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

There's no lonelier place in cinema.
When filmmakers use the term "shooting ratio," they don't mean the aspect ratio of the movie they're making. Instead, they're talking about the amount of footage they shot versus the amount that actually wound up in the finished movie. For example, director George Miller shot 480 hours of footage for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which ended up running two hours when it finally hit theaters. That's a 240:1 shooting ratio, which is extreme even for a high-budget picture. To put that in perspective, the ratio for Francis Ford Coppola's notoriously troubled Apocalypse Now (1979) was 95:1. High but not Fury Road high.
What do you think Ed Wood's shooting ratios were? Well, we actually have some evidence to work with here. Ed's Take It Out in Trade (1970) runs about 80 minutes. Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes (1995) runs about 69 minutes. Assuming every scrap of unused footage wound up in the outtake reel, that's 149 total minutes of film and a shooting ratio of 1.8:1. But let's be generous and round that up to 2:1. For projects like the Swedish Erotica loops, Ed's ratio was probably more like 1:1, meaning everything that was shot made the final cut.
Come to think of it, there's one more still-existent Ed Wood outtake reel that I know of: the one for his 1951 made-for-TV short, The Sun was Setting. The reel runs about seven minutes and change. The finished film itself is 13 and a half minutes. Altogether, that's 21 minutes of footage and a very economical 1.5:1 shooting ratio. Notice that, just like with the TIOIT outtakes, these are either alternate takes or little scraps from the beginnings and ends of scenes. There are no missing or deleted sequences visible here.

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

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

FUN FACT: In Spanish, Ed Wood is known as Eduardo Madera.
You might not believe this, but I used to be a Spanish teacher in a former life. Don't ask me to speak any of the language; what little I knew, I've long since forgotten. But I did take a few Spanish courses in college and memorized just enough to teach (uninterested, borderline hostile) middle schoolers some basic vocabulary words and common phrases. Beyond that, I was hopeless. The smarter kids in my classes must've known I was bluffing.
I don't have any nostalgia for my brief, benighted teaching career, but I do have some fond memories of those college courses. That must have been what possessed me to buy a set of Mexican lobby cards for Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) at auction a few years ago. I never did anything with those cards, by the way. They arrived in a large binder in 2015, and they're still in that binder now. Just a dumb, regrettable purchase all around.
I got to thinking recently about Eddie's movies playing in foreign countries, particularly Spanish-speaking ones. South of the border, down Mexico way, Plan 9 was known as Espectros del Espacio and was distributed by a company called Peliculas Coloso S.A. de C.V. (That name translates roughly as Colossus Films, Stock Corporation.) As far as I can tell, this was the company's only release. Or the only one people still remember. I'll have to assume Plan 9 was dubbed into Spanish back then, so that version of the film must exist somewhere. I'd be curious to hear what voice they gave Tor Johnson. Or Bunny Breckinridge. 
In 1961, Eddie's debut film, Glen or Glenda, was released in Argentina under the name Yo Cambiè Mi Sexo. I managed to find two version of the poster: one with its own unique artwork and one that used the artwork from the American poster. I can't decide which one I like better.
Two Argentinian posters for Glen or Glenda.
I can't let you go today before showing you yet another Argentinian poster, seemingly from the 1960s as well. This time around, Glenda was part of a triple feature alongside the infamous exploitation classic Mom & Dad (1945) and the Finnish drama Bewildered Youth (1957), billed as El Origen de la Natalidad and El Tercer Sexo respectively.
A strange night at the movies in Argentina.

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

Fawn Silver aka Fawn Silverton aka Fanya Carter in Millionaire.
Hugh Hefner really struck on a magic formula when he launched Playboy in 1953. Obviously, the main selling point was sex. But Hef's notorious magazine didn't just offer sex. It offered sex with class and style. Through its regular column, "The Playboy Philosophy," and other articles, the magazine espoused an entire lifestyle that included good wine, expensive stereo equipment, hip jazz, and sharp clothing. This was porn with a veneer of dignity. Hef wanted only the best for Playboy—the best looking women, the best writers, the best photographers, the best cartoonists. Even Stephen King, in the introduction to his anthology Skeleton Crew (1985), said it was a longtime goal to get a story in Playboy.
Naturally, with a success like this, there were imitators. Every MAD needs its Cracked. One wannabe Playboy, a magazine called Millionaire, lasted from 1964 to 1967. Not bad, all things considered. It blatantly copied from Hefner's formula. While each Playboy had its Playmate of the Month, Millionaire had its Heiress of the Month. For its May 1966 issue, the Heiress du mois was one Fawn Silverton. You probably know her better as Fawn Silver, the petulant and pouty Princess of Darkness in Orgy of the Dead (1965). In that Ed Wood-scripted, Steve Apostolof-directed burlesque show, Fawn is basically the Ed McMahon to Criswell's Johnny Carson.
Here's Fawn on the cover the magazine. Would this be enough to convince you to cough up 75 cents? (That's nearly seven bucks in today's money.)
All of those tycoons appear nude, by the way.
For those who don't know, Fawn's real name is Fanya Carter, and she came from wealth. Her father, Walter Carter, was once the head of Republic Pictures. In the mid-1960s, Fanya assumed a fake name and landed a few screen credits, Orgy being the most memorable. She soon got out of show business—way out of show business—and pursued an education. Today, she's a psychologist in Santa Monica and does not talk about or acknowledge her scandalous past. Here's a more recent picture of Dr. Carter, along with the cover a book she wrote about her father.
Fanya Carter; a biography of Fanya's father.

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

(left to right) Marijane Meaker's book; Ed Wood's script.
One of Ed Wood's professional rivals—or, perhaps, one of his influences—just died. And I mean just died. Marijane Meaker , who wrote under a number of names (including her own) from the 1950s to the 2000s, passed away at the age of  95 on November 21, 2022. Think of that: she was only two and a half years younger than Ed, and she was alive until just a few weeks ago.
The late Marijane Meaker.Like Ed Wood, Marijane hailed from the great state of New York, though she was from Auburn, a few hundred miles to the north and west of Ed's native Poughkeepsie. As a writer, Ms. Meaker rivaled Eddie in terms of versatility and productivity. Over the course of her half-century-long career, she jumped from alias to alias and genre to genre. As "M.E. Kerr," for instance, she wrote young adult fiction (Gentlehands; Deliver Us from Evie). As "Mary James," she wrote children's books (Shoebag; Frankenlouse). That's all very nice, I'm sure, and brought her a comfortable income and even critical acclaim. 
But what concerns us here today is the fact that, in 1952, Marijane Meaker pioneered the genre of so-called "lesbian pulp fiction" with a novel called Spring Fire. She wrote it under the pen name "Vin Packer," which she generally used for her mystery and crime books. In the heteronormative Eisenhower years, when being gay was still very much a taboo, the pulp publishers were the only ones who'd dare to release a book about lesbians. Marijane was a lesbian herself and eager to write about the Sapphic lifestyle, even if she had to do so under an alias.
Between 1955 and 1972, credited as "Ann Aldrich," she penned a series of five nonfiction paperbacks about lesbianism. The second of these, released in 1958, had a strangely familiar title: We, Too, Must Love. If you care to, you can read it here . Compared to the kind of stuff Ed Wood wrote, including his (often quite salacious) stories and articles about lesbians, Meaker's book is tame, tasteful, and subdued. The author based it on interviews with real women and approached the project as a journalist. The fact that these books were marketed as quasi-smut, complete with suggestive cover art, says more about the times than it does about the author.
But I'm sure Eddie was well aware of "Ann Aldrich." He kept pretty close tabs on what was happening in the adult publishing world, so Marijane Meaker's books about lesbianism would have been on his radar. Sometime in the 1970s, he wrote an unproduced screenplay called We Too Must Love, the title a direct lift from Meaker. This script might have been commissioned by Stephen C. Apostolof, since it wound up in the Apostolof archives. Thanks to Bob Blackburn, we have a brief glimpse of this never-to-be-filmed screenplay.
A couple of pages from Ed Wood's We Too Must Love.
Now, those of you who bothered to zoom in on that picture will see that Ed Wood's We Too Must Love was not about lesbians, at least not at first. Instead, it seems to be about the erotic adventures of someone named Jerry Hopper. But I think it's safe to say that, wittingly or not, Eddie was influenced by the works of Marijane Meaker. He had to grab that title from somewhere. So, MJ, we owe you a debt of gratitude.

Podcast Tuesday: "Abraham, Martin & Fonz"

David Hubbard, Gary Grubbs, Henry Winkler, and Al Molinaro on Happy Days.
Black characters rarely have much fun on Happy Days, largely because the sitcom only seems to bring them on when it wants to make a point about racism. 
As early as Season 1, there was "The Best Man," an episode in which Howard Cunningham (Tom Bosley) has misgivings about being the best man at the wedding of his Black former army buddy, Fred (Nashville star Robert DoQui). In Season 3, there was "Fonzie's New Friend," in which a young drummer named Sticks Downey (Jack Baker) can't perform with Richie's band at Arnold's because of the color of his skin. And Season 5 gave us "Fonzie for the Defense," in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Howard serve as jurors at a trial where the defendant, Jason (Ralph Wilcox), has been falsely accused of robbery at least partially because of his race.
Then, in Season 9, Happy Days made its ultimate statement about racism: "Southern Crossing," an episode in which Fonzie and his business partner Al (Al Molinaro) head down South in 1962 to protest segregated lunch counters. There, in some unspecified city, they clash with but ultimately befriend a young Black man named Charles (David Hubbard aka David Raynr), who wonders what these meddling white folks from Milwaukee are really trying to accomplish.
On the one hand, it's understandable that Happy Days would want to do an episode like this. After all, Season 9 of the show is set in the early 1960s, a time when the headlines were dominated by stories of the civil rights movement and protests in the South. If you're really looking back on this era of American history, you have to acknowledge this subject matter to some extent. 
On the other hand, Happy Days is a featherweight family comedy that has done such amusing but less-than-realistic episodes as "My Favorite Orkan," "The Evil Eye," "Fonzie's Funeral," and "Hollywood (Part 3)." How do you go from shark jumping to civil rights? Can you?
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we try to find out as we review "Southern Crossing." We hope you join us for what should be a very interesting episode.

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

The cover of It Takes One to Know One (1967).
Written under his own name and published by Pad Library in 1967, It Takes One to Know One is Ed Wood's most dense and challenging novel, perhaps even his literary magnum opus. A rambling, episodic story, it almost feels like two or three books that have been grafted together, Frankenstein-style. Some day, I may have to write a full review of it (or, even better, convince Greg Dziawer to review it with me on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast).
Waylon Smithers in a teddy bear costume.Until that day, I'll just say that It Takes One to Know One is the saga of Don/Donna, a sensitive, effeminate young man who is raped and humiliated in a college town and who decides to become a hobo in order to escape his shameful past. While riding the rails, he is mentored by a tough young woman named Pat, who introduces him to the world of drag performers. One remarkable thing about this novel is that it's one of Ed Wood's few works to reference Christmas directly. Today, for the 12th installment of the Ed-Vent Calendar, I'd like to share a seasonally-appropriate passage from the book with you:

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

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

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

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

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