WEIRD LOVE: The Church of Ed Wood

IN THE VAULT
WEIRD LOVE
Issue of 2004-10-25
Posted 2004-10-18
The New Yorker

The filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr., who died in 1978, didn’t make many movies
during the last decade of his life, owing to problems with money and
booze, not to mention the problem of never having made movies that were
any good in the previous decades. He got by, toward the end, by writing
pulp—some hundred and thirty-five sex novels, such as “Bye Bye Broadie”
and “Killer in Drag.” Seven years before he died, though, he did shoot
one last picture, a pornographic film called “Necromania: A Tale of
Weird Love!” Wood wrote, produced, and directed it (in three days,
dressed in a pink baby-doll outfit) under the name Don Miller. The
budget was five thousand dollars. It was one of the first skin flicks
to have what, technically, could be called a plot, and for Ed Wood
fanatics—among whom are many Woodites, as adherents of the Church of
the Heavenly Wood call themselves (no joke)—it was for years the
ultimate buried treasure, the Woodite equivalent of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Wood made two versions, one soft-core (the sex is simulated)
and the other hard-core (the sex is real), both of which went missing
after an extremely brief run at the Hudson Theatre, on West
Forty-fourth Street, in 1971. The soft-core version turned up at a yard
sale in California in 1992 and eventually achieved limited
distribution, thanks to the exertions of some West Coast cult-video
collectors. But the longer, dirtier cut was the grail.

In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudolph Grey, the author of the
Ed Wood biography “Nightmare of Ecstasy” (which became the basis for
the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood”), found the triple-X “Necromania” in a
warehouse in Los Angeles. He and a B-movie distributor named Alexander
Kogan bought the negatives for “two and a half nickels,” as Kogan put
it. Their next task was to figure out what to do with them. A year ago,
Kogan came across a profile in the Times of the blog impresario Nick
Denton, who had just launched a pornography Web site called Fleshbot.
Kogan e-mailed Denton and said that if Denton ever wanted to sell porn
films on his site he should consider buying “Necromania.” “I bought it
as a joke,” Kogan said last week, in an effort to make it clear that he
was not, repeat not, a pornographer.

Denton, however, was interested in it as a business proposition, in his
quest to become a pornographer, if a somewhat ironic one, and next week
he is releasing it as Fleshbot Films’ first title. And so, at long
last, Woodites, if not the world, have an opportunity to see the story
of Danny and Shirley, a young couple who, to spruce up their flagging
sex life, visit a strange house that seems to be both a sex clinic and
a funeral parlor. They seek out a therapist named Madame Heles, who
ministers to her patients inside a coffin. There are numerous erotic
pairings (including one between a woman and a bronze skull), some
delightfully incongruous music (surf songs and cha-cha-cha), and, of
course, choice dialogue (Danny, gesturing to a pair of red pajama
bottoms: “For such a fancy setting, you think these are conventional
enough?” Tanya: “The word ‘conventional’ has many connotations, never
more so than in this establishment”). Compared with the pneumatic
tattoo-and-tan-line porn that the Valley turns out these days, or even
with the steamier passages in the sexual-harassment suit filed against
Bill O’Reilly last week (one wishes that Wood had lived long enough to
make a movie called “Loofah!”), the squalor of the contortions onscreen
seems almost quaint.

Rudy Grey, who is in his forties and lives in Hell’s Kitchen, stopped
by the other day to deliver a copy of an article that he wrote two
years ago for the magazine Cult Movies, under the headline “Lost Ed
Wood Movies . . . Found!” (The other lost one was an unfinished porno
flick called “The Only House in Town,” which Fleshbot is releasing as
well.) Grey has spiky dark hair and patchy stubble; imagine Pedro
Almodóvar without a job. “Ed Wood was a great filmmaker,” Grey said.
“Maybe he’s not Hitchcock or Kubrick, but . . . ” Grey is not an ironic
enthusiast.

In his view, even “Necromania” contains moments of brilliance. Grey
writes in Cult Movies, “Take particular note also of the sequence which
begins 28 minutes & 7 seconds into the movie, where Ric Lutze struggles
to get his red pajama bottoms unraveled to put them on. But, he can’t.
His fumbling lasts about 15 seconds, easily edited out. But Wood
deliberately leaves it in. Why? I think it’s his perverse sense of
humor . . . I think he got a kick out of Lutze fumbling on camera with
the pants.” At the end of the piece, Grey remarks upon a moment when
Danny looks behind a curtain and glimpses what some might call a
blurry, kaleidoscopic orgy but which Grey calls “the sex dimension of
lost souls who can never be satisfied.” His last sentence: “Taking into
account the context and the tone of the rest of the movie, it may be
the most remarkable sequence in the history of film.”
— Nick Paumgarten

http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?041025ta_talk_paumgarten

and for you folks who just didn't get enough in this article:

The Church of Ed Wood's Yahoo Group
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/edwoodsholyhaven/
Where you can hear/see the, just uploaded, music video
"Someone Walked Over My Grave"
(in the files) by The Amazing Criswell

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