Joe Blevins's Blog, page 35

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 11: Rob Huffman on Timothy Farrell

Rob Huffman wrote me with some thoughts on actor Timothy Farrell.
"You must think me a crackpot at this point," Rob Huffman recently said to me in an email. No, Rob, I can honestly say I don't think you're a crackpot. I know you're a crackpot. That's who writes me, ladies and gentlemen—the obsessives, the die-hards, the never-give-uppers. I mean, who else is still reading this Ed Wood series after nine years? Sane, healthy, well-adjusted people?
Anyway, a few days back, I posted a little article about Timothy Farrell's performance in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953). In response to this (I think?), Rob sent me an email about Tim's still-living son, an ex-cop turned private investigator. Rob was apparently going to contact this shadowy son but thought better of it after hearing him on a podcast devoted to private investigators. (Such things exist? I thought PIs kept a low profile.) According to Rob, however, the younger Farrell knew very little of Timothy's film work.
Even though Timothy Farrell (real name: Timothy Sperl) played key roles in both Glenda and Jail Bait, plus the Wood-scripted The Violent Years (1956), I have not invested any time investigating the man's life whatsoever. I've been solely interested in Tim as an actor. Or at least I was until I read his :

Worked as a bailiff in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department while also working in the movies. One of his movies, Paris After Midnight (1951), was actually busted in a vice raid in the mid-'50s, which caused him professional embarrassment. He went on to work 20 years as an L.A. deputy marshall and eventually was appointed County Marshall in 1971. He was convicted of felony charges after his appointment, however, for "illegal use of deputy marshalls in political activities," and was given a six month sentence, but received probation due to poor health. He was fired in 1975.

Look, folks, I can't vouch for any of this. But you've gotta admit, it's interesting, right? And I'm well aware that those obsessives, die-hards, and never-give-uppers I mentioned at the beginning of this article already knew this stuff and probably want to send me a bunch more Timothy Farrell trivia. Which they're free to do, naturally. I can't promise I'll acknowledge all of it. Sorry.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 11: Rob Huffman on Timothy Farrell (and some other stuff)

Rob Huffman wrote me with some thoughts on actor Timothy Farrell.
"You must think me a crackpot at this point," Rob Huffman recently said to me in an email. No, Rob, I can honestly say I don't think you're a crackpot. I know you're a crackpot. That's who writes me, ladies and gentlemen—the obsessives, the die-hards, the never-give-uppers. I mean, who else is still reading this Ed Wood series after nine years? Sane, healthy, well-adjusted people?
Anyway, a few days back, I posted a little article about Timothy Farrell's performance in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953). In response to this (I think?), Rob sent me an email about Tim's still-living son, an ex-cop turned private investigator. Rob was apparently going to contact this shadowy son but thought better of it after hearing him on a podcast devoted to private investigators. (Such things exist? I thought PIs kept a low profile.) According to Rob, the younger Farrell knew very little of Timothy's film work and was a "dumb and dangerous person." Hmm. Sounds a bit like Tim's "Vic Brady" character in Jail Bait (1954).
Even though Timothy Farrell (real name: Timothy Sperl) played key roles in both Glenda and Jail Bait, plus the Wood-scripted The Violent Years (1956), I have not invested any time investigating the man's life whatsoever. I've been solely interested in Tim as an actor. Or at least I was until I read his :

Worked as a bailiff in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department while also working in the movies. One of his movies, Paris After Midnight (1951), was actually busted in a vice raid in the mid-'50s, which caused him professional embarrassment. He went on to work 20 years as an L.A. deputy marshall and eventually was appointed County Marshall in 1971. He was convicted of felony charges after his appointment, however, for "illegal use of deputy marshalls in political activities," and was given a six month sentence, but received probation due to poor health. He was fired in 1975.

I guess the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, eh? Speaking of which, Rob provided these unsavory details about Farrell's son:

A disgraced cop, he got a pension for what now people go to jail for. He once was a bodyguard for Larry Flynt. He got the job via his second cousin, [William Mentzer], who was a one-time Zodiac killer suspect while already doing time for the Cotton Club murders. He’s known as "Manson II." David Berkowitz, The Son of Sam, once said Manson II killed a woman at Memorial Church at Stanford University, but DNA has proven that false recently—like a Scooby-Doo episode, it was the janitor who was there all along for 50 years & had phoned it in.
[Timothy's son now] makes money from managing a block in L.A. that his grandparents bought. I saw him in a paper once giving ghost tours of the neighborhood at Halloween. He continues his mother’s canine charity. She, as you know, a Shirley, was in Glen or Glenda and The Violent Years. Their daughter, a bit actress, died young.

I should point out at this juncture that Rob sent me a little news article about Shirley Sperl, the one-time Mrs. Timothy Farrell, and how she was being honored for her charity work with animals, But Rob also said:

Don’t get me into how the Best Friends Animal Society—a different charity—was once The Process Church of the Final Judgement, a splinter of Scientology with a dose of Satanism to which Manson & Manson II can be linked.

Look, folks, I can't vouch for any of this. But you've gotta admit, it's interesting, right? And I'm well aware that those obsessives, die-hards, and never-give-uppers I mentioned at the beginning of this article already knew this stuff and probably want to send me a bunch more Timothy Farrell trivia. Which they're free to do, naturally. I can't promise I'll acknowledge all of it. Sorry.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 10: Eddie and Nurse Beulah

Ed Wood, minus his dentures, in September 1978.
Believe me when I say that no planning whatsoever went into this series. I just decided spontaneously on December 1 to write a short article per day about Ed Wood until Christmas. I didn't even think about the fact that the 44th anniversary of Eddie's death would fall somewhere in the middle of it. How sad that, during a time when Christians look forward to the birth of Jesus, we must pause to reflect on the death of Ed Wood. But that's the hand we've been dealt.
Is there anything left to say about that tragic day in December 1978 when Eddie—recently evicted from his Yucca Flats hovel and downing vodka shots at an alarming rate—died in the bedroom of his friend, actor Peter Coe? Well, yes. There's a minor supporting character in this story who has long intrigued me: an elderly nurse named Beulah Ames. She was apparently the first person to discover Ed Wood's dead body on the afternoon of December 10, 1978. In Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), she's mentioned by both Peter Coe and Kathy Wood. Here's the relevant passage:
All the mentions of Beulah Ames in Nightmare of Ecstasy.
Who was Beulah Ames and how did she come to be in this apartment on December 10, 1978? Was she a neighbor? A friend of Peter Coe's? Admittedly, I'm intrigued by Beulah for two main reasons. First, obviously, is her wonderfully old-fashioned first name. You don't see too many Beulahs walking the streets these days. Second, there's the highly dramatic quote attributed to her: "Ooooooooooh! My God! Eddie's dead!" Now, maybe Peter Coe is exaggerating here. He was an actor, after all. But maybe Beulah Ames really did say something like this 44 years ago today.
Either way, Beulah remains one of the many mysterious figures in the Ed Wood saga. Perhaps as a result of posting this article, I will hear from someone with the lowdown on this aged nurse and her connection to either Peter Coe or Eddie. One can only hope.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 9: Back into the Huffman Files we go!

Rob Huffman does not stop. He cannot stop.
This current series, The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, is strictly for me. What with work and other entanglements, I had really gotten out of the habit of writing anything, so I wanted to force myself to generate a few weeks of content for this blog. If people read it, great. If they don't... well, that's less great but still fine.
One person who definitely does read these articles is the unstoppable Rob Huffman. I figured he'd have some feedback on the Ed-Vent Calendar eventually, and I wasn't wrong. He sent me this neat photo of an ashtray from the dearly departed Cameo Room, the Hollywood bar where Kathy Wood first fell in love with Ed.
Remember when you could smoke in bars?
That very ashtray was going to serve as a crucial prop in a book that Rob was writing: a "pseudo-autobiography" of Ed Wood in the 1970s! His story would have Ed and Kathy stealing that ashtray from the Cameo Room as a memento. (Kathy would later chuck it at Ed's head during an argument.) This sounds like an interesting and fun project. Rob says he got about 150 pages into it and had even attracted some publisher interest before he abandoned it.
Rob also found this vintage postcard for the place, which is nice because it shows you the surprisingly plush interior. And on the exterior, we see that the bar was decorated with large cameos, hence the name.
A postcard advertising the Cameo Room. Nice place, huh?
I might as well show you the back of the postcard, too, since it's full of interesting historical details. You can see, for instance, that the card is postmarked 1950, which gives you some idea of its vintage. We even get the name of the manager, Rene Perdini, and another stamp that says, "BUILD YOUR FUTURE WISELY SAFELY U.S. SAVINGS BONDS." That's a real throwback to another era, as is the phone number (NOrmandie 1-3627). Even the brief message scrawled on the card has some human interest. For some reason, I find it charming that the words "today" and "tomorrow" used to be hyphenated. And it's nice to know that the Cameo was a "swell place to eat."
The back of the postcard pictured above.
Rob sent me more information and commentary about other aspects of the Ed-Vent Calendar, but I think I've given you more than enough for one day. After all, this is supposed to be short-form content.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 8: The most versatile office in movie history!

This seems like an office where a man could get things done... if he wanted to.
What do doctors do all day? Well, according to Ed Wood, they mainly wear nice suits, sit around in their offices all day (and night), and wait for trouble to come to them. It inevitably does.
The Coen brothers are rightly known for having a lot blustery authority figures behind heavy wooden desks in their movies. From Trey Wilson in Raising Arizona (1987) to David Huddleston in The Big Lebowski (1998), it's one of their favorite stock characters. I can scarcely think of a Coen film that doesn't have some version of this trope.
But Ed Wood liked to put a lot his authority figure characters behind desks, too. Think of Harvey B. Dunn as the slightly dotty, bird-loving Captain Robbins in Bride of the Monster (1955). In that film's quasi-sequel, Night of the Ghouls (1959), the role of Captain Robbins has shifted to Johnny Carpenter, but the dutiful policeman can still be seen parked behind his desk for a good portion of the movie, dully sending his men to what might well be their doom.
There's kind of a neat symmetry in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), since both the top-ranking human (Lyle Talbot as General Roberts) and the top-ranking alien (Bunny Breckinridge as the Ruler) are confirmed desk jockeys. And, obviously, the movie is bookended by the ultimate desk-sitter: Criswell.
While doing research for one of these blog posts, I noticed that the office of Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson) in Ed's seedy crime thriller Jail Bait (1954) looked strangely familiar.
Clancy Malone and Herbert Rawlinson in Jail Bait.
That's when I realized it was the same exact set used by Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) in Wood's previous film, Glen or Glenda (1953).
Shirley Sperl and her then-husband Timothy Farrell in Glen or Glenda.
It's all there—the wallpaper, the wood paneling that only goes halfway up, the bookshelves, the desk. All Ed Wood did between Glenda and Jail Bait was move the other chair from the left side of the screen to the right. That's what you call growing as a filmmaker. By the way, I'd give my eye teeth to know the name of that painting in the upper left corner. Do you know what it is?

The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar, Day 8: The most versatile office in movie history!

This seems like an office where a man could get things done... if he wanted to.
What do doctors do all day? Well, according to Ed Wood, they mainly wear nice suits, sit around in their offices all day (and night), and wait for trouble to come to them. It inevitably does.
The Coen brothers are rightly known for having a lot blustery authority figures behind heavy wooden desks in their movies. From Trey Wilson in Raising Arizona (1987) to David Huddleston in The Big Lebowski (1998), it's one of their favorite stock characters. I can scarcely think of a Coen film that doesn't have some version of this trope.
But Ed Wood liked to put a lot his authority figure characters behind desks, too. Think of Harvey B. Dunn as the slightly dotty, bird-loving Captain Robbins in Bride of the Monster (1955). In that film's quasi-sequel, Night of the Ghouls (1959), the role of Captain Robbins has shifted to Johnny Carpenter, but the dutiful policeman can still be seen parked behind his desk for a good portion of the movie, dully sending his men to what might well be their doom.
There's kind of a neat symmetry in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), since both the top-ranking human (Lyle Talbot as General Roberts) and the top-ranking alien (Bunny Breckinridge as the Ruler) are confirmed desk jockeys. And, obviously, the movie is bookended by the ultimate desk-sitter: Criswell.
While doing research for one of these blog posts, I noticed that the office of Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson) in Ed's seedy crime thriller Jail Bait (1954) looked strangely familiar.
Clancy Malone and Herbert Rawlinson in Jail Bait.
That's when I realized it was the same exact set used by Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) in Wood's previous film, Glen or Glenda (1953).
Shirley Speril and her then-husband Timothy Farrell in Glen or Glenda.
It's all there—the wallpaper, the wood paneling that only goes halfway up, the bookshelves, the desk. All Ed Wood did between Glenda and Jail Bait was move the other chair from the left side of the screen to the right. That's what you call growing as a filmmaker. By the way, I'd give my eye teeth to know the name of that painting in the upper left corner. Do you know what it is?

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 7: Let's recreate Ed and Kathy Wood's first meeting!

Perhaps the ghost of Ernest Holmes still haunts the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.
If  you've seen Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), you might think that Eddie met his wife Kathy in the waiting room of the same hospital where Bela Lugosi was undergoing rehab. In the film, Kathy (as played by Patricia Arquette) is knitting a pair of booties for her ailing father when Ed (Johnny Depp) sidles up to her and starts talking about angora. (Against all odds, this actually works!) Later, Kathy makes a pair of black booties for Bela (Martin Landau). But this story, sweet though it may be, is purely an invention of screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. As Bob Blackburn, Kathy Wood's co-heir, told me via Facebook:

[When] Kathy read the script and saw that they meet in the waiting area of the asylum, and she was knitting booties, she let out a cackle and said, "I've never knitted booties in my life!" Later, during a get-together, Kathy mentioned that to Scott Alexander, who said he'd written it as an homage to his own grandmother, so Kathy was okay with that. She still laughed about it every time it was mentioned.

According to Kathy herself, she and Ed actually met in church. Well, sort of. You may remember that, as part of yesterday's article, I included an anecdote from Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) in which Kathy describes seeing Ed for the first time. She said:

I met him once at the Wiltern theater, the Church of Religious Science. They had the Sunday holdings there, and up in the balcony, of course it was dark, and about three seats away from me was this handsome profile. And he passed the collection plate, and the next Sunday, he was there, too. And I never saw him again, just sitting there, three rows away from him. And I kept thinking about him.

Had Kathy not reunited with Ed Wood at the Cameo Room on Sunset Blvd., he might have been to her what the girl in the white dress was to Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane (1940). But they did meet up again and went on a decades-long adventure together.
Some of Kathy Wood's story was still puzzling to me. For one thing, the Wiltern Theatre, attached to the Pellissier Building in Los Angeles, is not a church. Named because of its location at the corner of Wilshire and Western in the Koreatown neighborhood, it's been host to all kinds of performances since opening in 1931, including concerts by Tom Petty and Madonna. Like Ed Wood himself, the Wiltern fell into disrepair in the 1970s. Unlike Ed, however, the Wiltern was spared from oblivion and has since been restored to its former glory.
So the Wiltern has been many things to many people over the years. But a church, it ain't. And what the heck is Religious Science anyhow? At first, I thought it might have something to do with Christian Science or maybe even (perish the thought) Scientology, but Religious Science is actually a spiritual movement created by Ernest Holmes (1887-1960), an author and lecturer from Maine who preached that man has the ability to guide his own destiny and that God wants us to be happy and successful. You can understand how a message like this would find a receptive audience in 20th century America.
After migrating West, Holmes started lecturing in Los Angeles in 1916 and kept at it for the rest of his life, moving into bigger venues along the way to accommodate his ever-growing audience. And, yes, the 1,850-seat Wiltern Theatre was one of the places where Ernest Holmes lectured for a time. The culmination of Holmes' career was the construction of the magnificent (and still-standing) at 3281 W. 6th St. in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, he died just a few months after the dedication.
Over the last couple of days, I've been listening to recordings of Ernest Holmes' lectures. They're incredibly soothing and inspiring, and I can easily understand how our Eddie would have been entranced by them. Ernest liked to talk about the power of the imagination and turning our dreams into reality, ideas that Ed would have wholeheartedly agreed with. I even found what is believed to be the only existing footage of an Ernest Holmes lecture. As you watch this, try to imagine you are in the Wiltern balcony with Ed Wood. Can't you just picture Eddie hanging on every word?

I know the picture quality of that last video is a little rough, so I thought I'd include an audio-only Ernest Holmes lecture. Again, I'd like you to sit back, close your eyes, and try to imagine that you are Ed Wood hearing these words in the 1950s. Holmes' lectures all sound pretty much the same, so this is very close to what Ed and Kathy would have heard at the Wiltern all those years ago.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 6: The Cameo Room

The Cameo Room played a key role in the Ed Wood story. Twice!
Two days ago, I shared some B&W publicity stills from The Beach Bunnies (1976), a mostly-forgotten sex comedy that Ed Wood wrote for director Stephen C. Apostolof. Way back in 2014, I fleetingly mentioned a long-gone nightclub called the Cameo Room that is briefly glimpsed in that film. Back then, I complimented the club on its "very cool-looking neon signs" but admitted that I couldn't pin down an exact location for the place.
Well, this week, reader Shawn Langrick let me know a little bit more about the Cameo Room. In a Facebook forum about Ed Wood, he wrote:

The Cameo Room was at 5061 Sunset Blvd. and was around from 1946 until at least 1977. This pic from 1946 is pretty dark, but I'd bet a good dinner at the Brown Derby that it's the same sign.

Here's that pic he's referring to:
An ad for the Cameo Room from 1946.
Shawn also mentioned that the Cameo Room was where Ed Wood met his wife Kathy. And, sure enough, in a chapter of Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) called "Marriage," Kathy Wood tells this anecdote:
Kathy describes the first three or four times she met Ed Wood.
I knew you'd want to see what the business looks like today. As of right now, 5061 Sunset Blvd. is an office building that's for sale . Astonishingly, though, it looks like the building is intact! The neon is gone, but the stucco walls and Spanish tile remain. And Ed Wood would have appreciated that there's a liquor store in the mini-mall next door.
The former site of the Cameo Room as it looks today.
Thanks again to Shawn Langrick for the cool Cameo Room research!

The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar, Day 6: The Cameo Room

The Cameo Room played a key role in the Ed Wood story. Twice!
Two days ago, I shared some B&W publicity stills from The Beach Bunnies (1976), a mostly-forgotten sex comedy that Ed Wood wrote for director Stephen C. Apostolof. Way back in 2014, I fleetingly mentioned a long-gone nightclub called the Cameo Room that is briefly glimpsed in that film. Back then, I complimented the club on its "very cool-looking neon signs" but admitted that I couldn't pin down an exact location for the place.
Well, this week, reader Shawn Langrick let me know a little bit more about the Cameo Room. In a Facebook forum about Ed Wood, he wrote:

The Cameo Room was at 5061 Sunset Blvd. and was around from 1946 until at least 1977. This pic from 1946 is pretty dark, but I'd bet a good dinner at the Brown Derby that it's the same sign.

Here's that pic he's referring to:
An ad for the Cameo Room from 1946.
Shawn also mentioned that the Cameo Room was where Ed Wood met his wife Kathy. And, sure enough, in a chapter of Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) called "Marriage," Kathy Wood tells this anecdote:
Kathy describes the first three or four times she met Ed Wood.
I knew you'd want to see what the business looks like today. As of right now, 5061 Sunset Blvd. is an office building that's for sale . Astonishingly, though, it looks like the building is intact! The neon is gone, but the stucco walls and Spanish tile remain. And Ed Wood would have appreciated that there's a liquor store in the mini-mall next door.
The former site of the Cameo Room as it looks today.
Thanks again to Shawn Langrick for the cool Cameo Room research!

Podcast Tuesday: "College is for Suckers!"

Tom Bosley, Henry Winkler, and Marion Ross on Happy Days.
In March 1982, Happy Days launched the fifth and last of its spinoffs, the short-lived and much-mocked Joanie Loves Chachi. By then, Happy Days itself was in its ninth season and drifting slowly but surely into total irrelevance. The Grim Reaper was looming. Two successful Happy Days spinoffs, Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley, were both nearing their ends as well, expiring in May 1982 and May 1983 respectively. 
Producer Garry Marshall must have figured that the only way to keep his TV empire alive was to make a Hail Mary play for the youth audience with a new series focusing on teenage lovebirds Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) and Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio) and their suspiciously 1980s-sounding music.  Don't forget that the MTV cable network had just launched in August 1981. This was definitely the golden age of music videos, and Garry wanted a piece of the action.
In retrospect, Marshall and company spent much of Season 9 of Happy Days setting up Joanie Loves Chachi. So many of the plots that year were about the young couple that even Fonzie (top-billed Henry Winkler) seemed to take a backseat to them. This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're reviewing "To Beanie or Not to Beanie," an episode in which Joanie makes some crucial decisions about her future, including taking a gap year between high school and college. Her parents, Howard (Tom Bosley) and Marion (Marion Ross), are horrified, but Fonzie tries to argue on Joanie's behalf.
"To Beanie or Not to Beanie" originally aired in January 1982, just two months before the start of Joanie Loves Chachi. The spinoff must have already been in the planning and production stages by then, so I'm guessing "To Beanie" was intended to ease viewers into the new show. Appropriately, then, the episode includes one of Joanie and Chachi's many, many musical numbers: an uptempo rock number called "Call." Joanie Loves Chachi would likewise feature many songs by the duo and their newly-formed band.
But does any of this make "To Beanie or Not to Beanie" a good episode? You can find out by listening to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .