Joe Blevins's Blog, page 36

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 5: The infinity of the depths of a man's mind

Timothy Farrell delivers one of the great lines in movie history.
One of my favorite moments in the entire Ed Wood canon occurs about 10 minutes into Glen or Glenda (1953). Some context first: Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot) visits the office of Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) to try to understand why a local crossdresser, Patrick aka Patricia, committed suicide recently. The policeman thinks the doctor might have some special insight into the case after having assisted in several prominent sex changes. Alton agrees to share some knowledge with Warren, but says he must talk about two very different kinds of cases to make his point. Inspector Warren says he'd like to hear the story to the fullest.
Until now, this scene in Glen or Glenda has played like a rather dry documentary or perhaps even an educational film for bored schoolchildren. We have two somewhat dull, middle-aged white guys in suits, both authority figures—representatives of Law and Medicine, respectively—chatting politely across a desk in one of those offices with cluttered bookshelves in the background. Ed has covered this conversation in a staid, conventional manner: mostly mid-shots of actors Lyle Talbot and Timothy Farrell, with occasional two-shots of both men.
But at this point in the conversation, Eddie does something very interesting and wonderful. He punches in for a dramatic closeup of Timothy Farrell, who addresses the camera (and the viewer) with a strange intensity: "Only the infinity of the depths of a man's mind can really tell the story." Wood lingers on Farrell's unsmiling face for a few seconds and lets the shot go out of focus before cutting to stock footage of lightning, which then dissolves to a scene of Bela Lugosi as The Spirit. In a trice, we have been transported from the world of documentaries to the world of dreams.
I've often said that Glen or Glenda serves as a Rosetta Stone for the rest of Ed Wood's career, and this scene with Dr. Alton is a good example of what makes him special as a writer and director. That line—"the infinity of the depths of a man's mind"—really shows you how Eddie thought. He loved words that refer to a vast, unquantifiable expanse. Along with "infinity," Ed used "oblivion," "never," and "eternity" again and again in his writing, especially his short stories and novels. Glenda has another beautiful example when Bela mentions "the endless reaches of time." If you want to think like Ed, think big. And vague.
Some time ago, I decided to commemorate the "depths of a man's mind" scene with some fan art, and for Day 5 of my Ed-vent Calendar, I'm sharing it with you now.
Some fan art of Timothy Farrell in Glen or Glenda.

The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar, Day 5: The infinity of the depths of a man's mind

Timothy Farrell delivers one of the great lines in movie history.
One of my favorite moments in the entire Ed Wood canon occurs about 10 minutes into Glen or Glenda (1953). Some context first: Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot) visits the office of Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) to try to understand why a local crossdresser, Patrick aka Patricia, committed suicide recently. The policeman thinks the doctor might have some special insight into the case after having assisted in several prominent sex changes. Alton agrees to share some knowledge with Warren, but says he must talk about two very different kinds of cases to make his point. Inspector Warren says he'd like to hear the story to the fullest.
Until now, this scene in Glen or Glenda has played like a rather dry documentary or perhaps even an educational film for bored schoolchildren. We have two somewhat dull, middle-aged white guys in suits, both authority figures—representatives of Law and Medicine, respectively—chatting politely across a desk in one of those offices with cluttered bookshelves in the background. Ed has covered this conversation in a staid, conventional manner: mostly mid-shots of actors Lyle Talbot and Timothy Farrell, with occasional two-shots of both men.
But at this point in the conversation, Eddie does something very interesting and wonderful. He punches in for a dramatic closeup of Timothy Farrell, who addresses the camera (and the viewer) with a strange intensity: "Only the infinity of the depths of a man's mind can really tell the story." Wood lingers on Farrell's unsmiling face for a few seconds and lets the shot go out of focus before cutting to stock footage of lightning, which then dissolves to a scene of Bela Lugosi as The Spirit. In a trice, we have been transported from the world of documentaries to the world of dreams.
I've often said that Glen or Glenda serves as a Rosetta Stone for the rest of Ed Wood's career, and this scene with Dr. Alton is a good example of what makes him special as a writer and director. That line—"the infinity of the depths of a man's mind"—really shows you how Eddie thought. He loved words that refer to a vast, unquantifiable expanse. Along with "infinity," Ed used "oblivion," "never," and "eternity" again and again in his writing, especially his short stories and novels. Glenda has another beautiful example when Bela mentions "the endless reaches of time." If you want to think like Ed, think big. And vague.
Some time ago, I decided to commemorate the "depths of a man's mind" scene with some fan art, and for Day 5 of my Ed-vent Calendar, I'm sharing it with you now.
Some fan art of Timothy Farrell in Glen or Glenda.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 4: Publicity stills from 'The Beach Bunnies' (1976)

Based on that spelling of "colour," I'd say this Betamax copy of The Beach Bunnies hails from England.
I've said it before, but depending on how you look at it, Stephen C. Apostolof's  The Beach Bunnies (1976) could be considered Ed Wood's final film. After all, it's the last feature film based on one of Eddie's original scripts to go into production during his own lifetime. Wood and Apostolof would collaborate on one more film, the ill-fated jewel heist comedy  Hot Ice (1978) , but I'll be darned if I can figure out precisely what Eddie did on that one. (On at least one resume, he claimed to have written it, but Apostolof himself disputed that.)
My point is, despite being a sleazy seaside sex comedy with an unfortunate rape subplot, The Beach Bunnies is a milestone film in the Ed Wood canon. 
Anyway, while researching Dad Made Dirty Movies: The Erotic World of Stephen C. Apostolof , Jordan Todorov and I went through reams of photographs from Steve Apostolof's personal archives, including some rarely-seen B&W publicity stills from The Beach Bunnies. I thought, for the fourth day of the Ed-Vent Calendar, we'd go through them together.
Marland Proctor (lower right corner) admires the elusive Pink Bikini Girl.
One of the oddities of The Beach Bunnies is that it devotes a sizable amount of its climactic bonfire scene to a character who is never named nor even credited: a raven-haired lass I have dubbed Pink Bikini Girl. While the film's other characters are sorting out their romantic misunderstandings and wrapping up assorted subplots, director Steve Apostolof apparently gets bored with them and simply points his camera at this striking young lady as she dances sensually on the beach. It's a good decision. There's even a publicity still of this dancer, so Steve obviously wanted to use her image to market The Beach Bunnies.
Johnny Fain and Linda Gildersleeve in The Beach Bunnies.
The closest thing The Beach Bunnies had to a "star" in its cast was professional surfer Johnny Fain, charmingly billed as Johnny Aquaboy. His character, an overprivileged layabout named Dennis, romances one of the film's four main female characters, Sheila (Linda Gildersleeve). In the photo above, we see Johnny and Linda posing with Johnny's now-antiquated Kennedy longboard. Incidentally, Kennedy is a maker of custom surf equipment in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their family-owned Ventura Boulevard store is still open as of 2022. 
A Japanese tourist (right) and his parasol-toting companion in The Beach Bunnies.
To the extent that The Beach Bunnies has a "main" storyline, it involves celebrity gossip reporter Elaine Street (Brenda Fogarty) as she relentlessly pursues movie star Rock Sanders (Marland Proctor) for a story. (She wants to confirm whether or not Rock is undergoing a sex change. Spoiler: he isn't.) Like Wile E. Coyote, Elaine tries one wacky ploy after another to get Rock's attention. One gambit involves wading into the ocean and pretending to be attacked by a shark, hoping that Rock will rescue her. Instead, it's an unnamed Japanese tourist who "saves" the day. Ed Wood and Steve Apostolof were not known for their subtlety when it came to humor. So the Japanese man has the obligatory giant camera dangling around his neck, while his companion carries one of those pleated parasols (properly known as Wagasa ).
Wendy Cavanaugh, Mariwin Roberts, Brenda Fogarty, and Linda Gildersleeve.
Though the Elaine/Rock story takes up the most screen time, The Beach Bunnies is an ensemble comedy at heart. Set at a beach resort, the film focuses around four vacationing female friends: the aforementioned Elaine and Sheila, plus Bonnie (Wendy Cavanaugh) and Lorrie (Mariwin Roberts). Each lady gets her own, individual subplot, and all four of them meet up occasionally to discuss how things are going. Director Steve Apostolof may have been trying to cultivate a new repertory cast, since three of these ladies (Cavanaugh, Roberts, and Gildersleeve) returned for Hot Ice. Sadly, that turned out to be Steve's final film.

The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 3: Seinfeld, "The Chinese Restaurant" (1991)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jerry Seinfeld, Norman Brenner (in back), and Jason Alexander on Seinfeld.
Something rather remarkable happened on May 23, 1991. One of Ed Wood's movies was mentioned—not just mentioned, mind you, but was integral to the plot of—a prime time American network sitcom watched by millions of people. Yes, that was the fateful night when Seinfeld aired its famous episode, "The Chinese Restaurant," on NBC. Can that episode really be 31 years old already? How time flies.
James Hong on Seinfeld.The plot has Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), and Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) stopping at Hunan 5th Avenue to get a quick dinner before going to see Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) at a "one night only" screening. Their plans are derailed when the restaurant's ever-smiling host, Bruce (screen legend James Hong), fails to give them a table, and they are forced to mill around in the lobby for what seems a small eternity. Bruce repeatedly assures Jerry and the gang that the wait will only be "five, ten minutes," but they eventually grow weary and leave, giving up on their now-ruined evening plans.
Apart from two brief wraparound segments showing Jerry Seinfeld performing stand-up comedy in a nightclub, "The Chinese Restaurant" unfolds in real time in one location. The script includes lots of dialogue and very little action, making it more like a stage play than a typical TV sitcom. NBC was baffled by it and was even reluctant to air it. Seinfeld was still a fledgling show back then—not yet the ratings powerhouse it would become—and network executive Warren Littlefield admits he "didn't get it" when Jerry and his writing partner, Larry David, submitted the script for approval. And yet, "The Chinese Restaurant" proved pivotal in Seinfeld's history. The unusual episode garnered a lot of audience attention and helped distinguish Seinfeld from the dozens of other live-action comedies on TV at the time. This was the kind of offbeat story other shows would never even think of doing.
For Ed Wood and Plan 9 from Outer Space, this attention was almost unprecedented. Not since It Came from Hollywood (1982) had Eddie received such mainstream exposure. And, since that movie had flopped pretty hard, it's likely that "The Chinese Restaurant" was the first time most viewers had even heard of Plan 9. Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) wasn't even out yet, and Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) was years away. It's possible that some viewers even sought out Plan 9 because of "The Chinese Restaurant," though I'm not sure what the movie's VHS availability would have been at the time. Jerry doesn't mention any specific plot points but does say that Plan 9 is the worst movie of all time and that he's going to the screening specifically to make snide comments. That's why he needs George and Elaine to come with him and serve as an audience.
The idea to include Plan 9 in "The Chinese Restaurant" came from Seinfeld executive story editor and proud Ed Wood fan Larry Charles. If Jerry were trying to make a movie on time, that would give the story a "ticking clock" and a sense of urgency. He has to get that table! He even dodged a dinner with his uncle (apparently not Uncle Leo) for this opportunity. As Jerry himself explains to Elaine: "I couldn't have dinner with him. Plan 9 from Outer Space! One night only! The big screen! My hands are tied!" I'm not sure if either Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David had ever heard of Plan 9, but the bearded, long-haired Larry Charles—imagine a hippie Gandalf—definitely looks like the kind of cult film freak I've seen at Ed Wood marathons over the years.

Revisiting Seinfeld's "Chinese Restaurant" episode for this article was a total delight. It still made me laugh out loud 31 years after I first saw it, mainly because I could relate to the characters' impatience and rising frustration throughout the running time. Jason Alexander, in particular, is a master of peevishness. The lobby of the restaurant becomes a gaily-decorated purgatory for the Seinfeld characters, the bright red color scheme offering an ironic counterpoint to the misery of Jerry, George, and Elaine. 
The long-running series notoriously ended with the characters in an actual jail cell, but this early episode (only the 16th to air!) shows how these jaded New Yorkers are already boxed in by the world around them. I was reminded of that Twilight Zone episode, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," or the works of Franz Kafka. In particular, "The Chinese Restaurant" strongly resembles "Before the Law," a parable included in Kafka's novel The Trial (1925). In the parable, a man from the country tries to access "the law" but is kept from it by a sinister, aloof doorkeeper. The man from the country even tries to bribe the doorkeeper to no avail. The doorkeeper accepts the bribe but does not allow the man entry to the law. ("I'm only taking this so you won't feel you've left something untried," the doorkeeper tells him.) A very similar thing happens in this episode when Elaine clumsily bribes Bruce for a table but gets nothing in return.
Incidentally, at the height of Seinfeld mania in the early '90s, Entertainment Weekly put out an entire book called The Entertainment Weekly Seinfeld Companion (1993) by Bruce Fretts. You can read it here if you like. It's an A-to-Z glossary of the pop culture references and running jokes of Seinfeld. And, yes, Plan 9 from Outer Space makes the cut, right between "Ping" and "Polar Bear Club." It's even accompanied by a stock (uncredited) photo of Tor Johnson and Vampira.
Tor Johnson and Vampira in a Seinfeld companion book.
And here's a closer look at the relevant passage:
Let's give you a better look at Tor Johnson's pretty face.
P.S. Jerry finally gets to see Plan 9 from Outer Space in a later Seinfeld episode called "The Postponement." And, yes, I may have to revisit that one as well eventually.

The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar, Day 2: Eddie's little brother, Bill

I tried to make this picture of Bill Wood look Christmasy. Did I succeed?
The second installment of this series is going to be a lot shorter and less elaborate than the first. That's the way these pop culture advent calendars usually work. Some days, you'll get something substantial. Other days, not so much. If you're working your way through a Lego advent calendar, for instance, you shouldn't expect to find a minifig behind every door. That wouldn't be cost-effective. So instead, you get a few minifigs scattered throughout the month, and in between, you get little accessories. Like maybe one day, you'll get a nice hat for your minifig. 
Well, today's article is a Lego hat.
Remember Howard William "Bill" Wood (1926-1986), Ed Wood's little brother? The one who made a career out of the military but didn't live to see age 60? I wrote a whole article about him back in January 2021. At the time, I said I didn't even have a photograph of the man, but when I was looking through my archives for material for this project, I found that wasn't true. In fact, I do have a news clipping from the November 17, 1955 edition of The Poughkeepsie Journal that includes a picture of Bill. When I stumbled upon it, I hastily added it to my original article. But I thought I'd post it here, too, so more people could see it.
Ed Wood's brother, Bill, at age 29 in 1955.
He looks an awful lot like Eddie, doesn't he? Actually, he looks like Ed Wood crossed with Howard McNear, the actor who played Floyd the barber on The Andy Griffith Show. Bill would have been 29 years old at the time this picture was taken, but he somehow looks substantially older. Maybe everyone looked older back then. He was already a husband and father by then, but the army, in its infinite wisdom, had him futzing around with airplanes in Canada.

The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar, Day 1: The Basketballers (1973)

Mockup poster for an Ed Wood/Steve Apostolof film that never was.
It seems like every year, there are more and more of those specialized advent calendars based on different brands or franchises. You know the ones I mean. There's a Disney one, a Marvel one, a Mario one, etc. But there's never been an official Ed Wood advent calendar! It's an outrage! Isn't the director of Glen or Glenda (1953) as worthy of his own advent calendar as Harry Potter, Lego, or Pokemon? And yet, we Woodologists have been denied!
Well, this year, I'm setting out to change that with a series I call The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar. Each day in December until Christmas, I'll post a bite-sized article about some little aspect of Ed Wood's life or career. Nothing too serious, just a little Wood to get you through the hectic holiday season. Sound good? Then let's continue.
For Day 1, I'm choosing The Basketballers, an unproduced script Eddie wrote for his frequent collaborator, director Stephen C. Apostolof, in 1973. In Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), Rudolph Grey describes the film thusly: "Unfilmed screenplay by Ed Wood and Stephen Apostolof involves sports, sex and drugs on a small town college campus." I wonder if the tone would have been similar to Apostolof's previous film,  College Girls (1968) ?
The Basketballers is one of several Wood/Apostolof projects that never went before the cameras, but this one must've gotten fairly far along in preproduction. In the Apostolof archives, now in the possession of the director's youngest son Chris, there exist at least two drafts of the screenplay: one from 1973, another from 1974. For the record, Ed Wood is the sole credited screenwriter on both drafts. Intriguingly, the second one carries the legend: "Property of Valentine Enterprises Inc., Hollywood, Calif." Was Valentine some production company that either Steve or Ed was trying to start?
Two drafts of The Basketballers.
Despite co-authoring an entire book about Stephen C. Apostolof—and have I mentioned that it makes a swell Christmas present ?— I have never actually seen or read the screenplay for The Basketballers. Those pictures up there were taken by Bob Blackburn when he visited Chris Apostolof in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. Apparently, Steve's archives include a fair amount of Basketballers ephemera, including the contract Eddie signed with Apostolof Film Productions, Inc. to write the script on October 10, 1973. Coincidentally, that would have been Eddie's 49th birthday.
Ed Wood signed a contract to write The Basketballers on October 10, 1973.
Perhaps most intriguing of all is this mockup of a poster for The Basketballers. To me, it's clear that Steve fully intended to go into production on this script. Like all of the Apostolof films of this era, The Basketballers would have been released under the familiar SCA banner. Note that the poster also proclaims that the film will be in Eastman color. Up until the late 1960s, many low budget sex films (including a few of Apostolof's) were still in B&W. Meanwhile, those scantily-clad cheerleaders are highly suggestive of College Girls and may even have been modeled on Steve's leading lady, Marsha Jordan.
A rough draft for a Basketballers poster.
As further evidence of how serious Steve Apostolof was about The Basketballers, here's a trade paper ad for another Wood/Apostolof joint, Fugitive Girls (1974). This one proudly proclaims that The Basketballers, which now even has its own logo, is being prepared for a "June release." Since Fugitive Girls itself didn't come out until July 1974, Steve must have been looking forward to June 1975. As we now know, that didn't happen. But Steve and Ed weren't done yet! Their next collaboration, The Beach Bunnies, would come out in 1976.
This trade ad for Fugitive Girls mentions The Basketballers.
And that's it. That's Day 1 of The 2022 Ed-vent Calendar. I don't think the subsequent articles will be this long, but I wanted to kick off this series with something special. Hope you enjoyed it.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 137: "The Beacon" (1973)

Are you turned on by the color of Pepto Bismol? (Artwork from Savage.)
You know, it's a small world. Back in the 1950s, my mom's parents ran a little bar in Northern Michigan called The Beacon. I picture it as a place frequented by flannel-clad deer hunters. Almost nothing remains of this long-gone beer joint, apart from some well-worn jukebox 45s that I still have in my collection—everything from Pat Boone to Fats Domino. In fact, I hadn't even thought about The Beacon in a long time until the great Bob Blackburn sent me a vintage Ed Wood story with a curiously familiar title.
The story: "The Beacon." Originally published in Savage (Gallery Press), vol. 2, no.2, June/July 1973. Credited to "Stanley John."
Synopsis: Jeanne, an 18-year-old Kansas farmgirl, is driving home one dark night after losing her virginity to her boyfriend, Jim. She unwisely decides to take a desolate, poorly maintained backroad in order to return home at a "respectable hour." As she drives down this bumpy, winding path, she thinks back to the sexual ecstasy she recently experienced with Jim. Unfortunately, Jeanne's car gets hopelessly lodged in a deep rut, leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Jeanne ponders whether to just spend the night in her car when she sees a bright yellow light in the distance—a beacon signaling to her. The light emanates from the attic of a remote farmhouse. When the girl knocks on the door, she is very surprised to find that the inhabitants, an attractive couple named Kirk and Elaine, are elegantly dressed and have decorated their home in an ultra-modern style. At first, Jeanne is skeptical and afraid. (Why should they be so dressed up in the middle of the night?) But she soon warms to Kirk and Elaine and partakes of the food and drink they offer.
This, too, proves a mistake. The now-drugged Jeanne finds herself being used like a living sex toy by Kirk and Elaine. The former ties her up while the latter penetrates her with a rubber strap-on. They continue with their "weird sexings" even after Jeanne passes out. As we ultimately learn, Kirk and Elaine do this all the time. They deliberately booby-trap the road, sell the cars to the local scrapyard, and bury the drivers beneath the house after drugging and raping them. This is to be Jeanne's fate as well.
Excerpt: "The nightmare began to move rapidly, in a blur of lights, faces, penises, arms, legs, breasts, thighs, buttocks, pubises. . Jeanne was pulled from the bed and led to the corner of the room. Kirk dangled a long rope in one hand and held his dick in the other."
Table of contents from Savage's June/July 1973 issue.Reflections: It was typical for the adult magazines published by the Pendulum/Calga/Gallery consortium in the 1970s to have particular themes. Voyeurism, lesbianism, group sex, lingerie—whatever you were into, they had a magazine especially for you. The theme of Savage seems to have been S&M. An editorial on the magazine's contents page from its June/July '73 issue explains this fetish in the driest, most convoluted way possible. It starts out like so:

When one thinks of how strongly integrated our understanding of body abuse is to corporal punishment it is easier to comprehend why it is so very difficult to accept the existence of a pain-pleasure principle.

Clear as mud, huh? Try diagramming that sentence.
Ed Wood very likely penned that editorial, and he is also undoubtedly the author of "The Beacon," a strange and unsettling short story published in that same exact magazine and credited to the nonexistent Stanley John. (Any similarity to the horror host and author John Stanley is coincidental.) This particular issue of Savage also included "The Movement," which Ed wrote under his more common pseudonym, Dick Trent. I now fully understand why editor Bob Blackburn included that article in the S&M section of When the Topic is Sex.
Eddie sometimes ignored a magazine's theme when he wrote his stories and articles. None of his pieces for Garter Girls feature garters, for instance. But he did give the readers of Savage a little bondage action in "The Beacon." I'm not sure if the magazine's audience would be sated by that, however, since the bondage scene is brief and occurs in the midst of a rape/murder. Is the reader supposed to identify with or envy Kirk in this story? That's an upsetting thought.
"The Beacon" is one of Ed Wood's many tales of innocence defiled, and it would have fit in beautifully in Blood Splatters Quickly or Angora Fever. Yes, the narrator does tell us that sophisticated Elaine is wearing an angora sweater (with nothing underneath!), but the connection to Wood goes much deeper than that. Many of Ed's stylistic quirks are here, including an abundance of ellipses and RANDOM CAPITALIZATION. Some of Eddie's favorite words, like "thrill" and "lovely," turn up here, too. Like any good Ed Wood protagonist, Jeanne experiences "chills" twice—once while making love to Jim and once while thinking back on it. This is emblematic of Wood's writing; his characters are forever having hot flashes or cold chills.
What really makes this an Ed Wood story is its overall structure. The setup—a luckless woman stranded on a country road in the night after having car trouble—is pure Eddie. Similar events occur in both Night of the Ghouls (1959) and Orgy of the Dead (1965). The sinister farmhouse in "The Beacon" has many first cousins in the Wood canon as well. Think of the old Willows place in Bride of the Monster (1955) or the titular bordello in "The Whorehouse Horror" (1972), not to mention the crumbling castle in "Dracula Revisited" (1971) and even Madam Heles' pleasure palace in Necromania (1971). (Remember that some of Madam Heles' guests never leave.) It's also typical for Eddie's short stories to take a gruesome turn about two-thirds of the way through, so the ghoulish payoff of "The Beacon" is highly Woodian.
Most importantly, like many of Ed Wood's films and stories, "The Beacon" intertwines and essentially equates sex and death. If you have sex, you die. I could not help but feel that Jeanne was being severely punished for losing her virginity to Jim, a massively-endowed barley deliveryman. Elaine even tells her, "You're not all that innocent." So even a stranger can tell that Jeanne has been deflowered. From that perspective, "The Beacon" becomes a cautionary tale to young women, as if there were any reading Savage in 1973.

Special thanks to Bob Blackburn for sending me this story and making this article possible.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 136: The Huffman Files

"We have top men working on it right now." "Who?" "Top... men."
This series has unexpectedly been on hiatus for the last few weeks. Sorry about that. What can I say, folks? Life gets in the way of Ed Wood scholarship sometimes. It's certainly not for lack of material to cover. In fact, there's way, way too much still left to cover. And more of Ed Wood's work is being discovered all the time—articles, stories, novels, scripts, loops, and even feature films. Had we but world enough and time...
Meanwhile, loyal reader and former Ed Wood Summit Podcast guest Rob Huffman has been faithfully flooding my inbox with photos and press clippings about Eddie and his various professional associates. I think his intent was to inspire me or Greg Dziawer to write a new article. Well, in a roundabout way, he was successful, because this week we are delving deep into The Huffman Files.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Sting"

Josh Cadman and Denis Mandel on Happy Days.
One of the weirdest things about the movie Grease (1978) is its depiction of a supporting character named Eugene Felsnic (Eddie Deezen). He's instantly recognizable as the textbook, all-American nerd. He dresses like Pee-wee Herman, talks like Jerry Lewis, and generally moves about in a klutzy, uncoordinated way. The other students at Rydell High treat Eugene like absolute garbage throughout the entire movie. The first time we see him, he's being harassed on the stairway. Some other students zap Eugene with a joy buzzer and steal his bowtie. They threaten to steal his glasses, too, but he somehow holds onto them. (He has an astigmatism.) 
If Grease were a horror movie, Eugene would be the character who snaps and starts bumping off his classmates in cruel, elaborate ways. (The 1986 slasher flick Slaughter High actually does have a similar plot.) But there's no redemption or revenge for Eugene Felsnic. He passively accepts his classmates' abuse with only mild consternation. The only saving grace here is that Eugene seems oblivious to the fact that he's on the bottom rung of the Rydell social ladder. Most of the time we see him, he's grinning like a jack-o-lantern, hopping around, and applauding enthusiastically (too enthusiastically) for just about everything. He seems fine.
Borrowing a page from the Grease playbook, Happy Days has its own nerdy Eugene character. In this case, it's Eugene Belvin, played by Denis Mandel. He has a lot in common with Grease's Eugene Felsnic. They both dress, act, and talk like cartoonish stereotypes, and their classmates treat both of them horribly. Even Fonzie (Henry Winkler), Eugene's teacher, bullies him a little. And, just as in Grease, this is all acceptable because Eugene is such a cluelessly cheerful schmuck.
In Season 9, Happy Days finally gave Eugene his own spotlight episode: "Hello, Tough Guy." The plot has poor Eugene trying to convince Jenny Piccalo (Cathy Silvers) that he's a macho, macho man by beating up Chachi (Scott Baio) in a staged "fight" at Arnold's. When this doesn't work, Eugene is called upon to defend Jenny's honor by fighting a towering thug named Lou (Josh Cadman) at a seedy dive called Vinnie's.
Who will survive and what will be left of them? Find out when we review "Hello, Tough Guy" on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast . 

Podcast Tuesday: "The Big Chill"

Vahan Moosekian on Happy Days.
It was inevitable. We reviewed an episode of Happy Days I loved ( "Just a Piccalo" ), then an episode I hated ( "No, Thank You" ). The logical next step was an episode I was totally indifferent to. And that's what "Baby, It's Cold Inside" is. It's the most basic, stock sitcom episode you can imagine. The damned thing might as well have been assembled from a kit. This didn't need even need to be a Happy Days episode especially; just about any family sitcom could have done this story.
The plot has Joanie (Erin Moran) taking care of her infant nephew, Richie, Jr., while her parents (Tom Bosley and Marion Ross) are out of town. She wants to prove to her folks that she's a responsible young woman, not just a little kid. Naturally, there are complications. The boiler breaks down during a cold snap, and a wisecracking repairman who calls himself Rudy to the Rescue (Vahan Moosekian) wants $200 to fix it. Also, Richie, Jr. is suffering from his first-ever cold. To make things worse, Joanie's friend Jenny (Cathy Silvers) has invited all their idiot friends over to the house for an impromptu party. How will Joanie handle all these disasters at once? The answer turns out to be not that interesting, quite frankly.
Can we turn a dull episode into an exciting podcast? Find out by listening to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast . If nothing else, if you stick around until the end, you'll hear some music by the one and only Weird Paul . Thanks, WP, for letting us use your song!