Ed Wood Wednesdays: A 'Final Curtain' Call? (Guest Author: James Pontolillo)

Duke Moore stars in Ed Wood's Final Curtain.
Following a well-established trend of sci-fi, suspense and supernatural anthology series on television begun in the late-1940s (more than a dozen programs including The Clock [1949], Alfred Hitchcock Presents [1955], and Strange Stories [1956]), Ed Wood, Jr. proposed his own anthology series entitled Portraits of Terror. Only one episode was produced, a 22-minute pilot called Final Curtain that was shot silent with music, narration and sound effects added in post-production. See Blevins (2013), as well as Rausch and Pratt (2015) for plot synopses and additional details. To date, there has been only a limited discussion concerning the Final Curtain filming locations and an incomplete presentation of identifying photographs. My goal is to better document this obscure piece of Wood-work.