By Peter Landau
Edward D. Wood Jr.'s grade-Z filmmaking was immortalized by Tim Burton in Ed Wood (1994), with chiseled heartthrob Johnny Depp portraying Wood. But the story only went so far into the torrid and sad career of Hollywood's obsessive auteur. The biopic wisely chose to bring the curtain down long before Wood's life ended in 1978, ravaged by alcoholism and poverty.
Today an icon of Tinseltown camp, in the mid-'60s and into the '70s Wood was desperately trying to make ends meet by contributing to the newest celluloid game in town, sexploitation. His soft- and hardcore movies, such as Shotgun Wedding (1963), The Only House in Town (1971), and Necromania (1971) disappeared shortly after premiering in various grindhouses across the country and have since loomed large in the growing legend of arguably the worst director in history.
Wood's filmography includes now cult classics such as his semiautobiographical look at transvestitism Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), famous for being Bela Lugosi's last role (he died during filming and was replaced not so seamlessly by a body double). But not everyone finds the cross-dressing filmmaker such a goof. Rudolph Grey, author of the exhaustive Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. (Feral House), which Burton's movie is based on, is a true believer in the (no irony, please) genius of Wood.
In 2001 Grey discovered prints to the three Holy Grails of Wood's later period collecting dust in a warehouse in Los Angeles. With B-movie distributor Alexander Kogan, he bought the prints for "two and a half nickels," as Kogan is quoted in a recent "Talk of the Town" piece in The New Yorker.
"They in turn approached Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, last year after hearing about the launch of Fleshbot last November, knowing that Nick was trying to bridge the whole porn and mainstream thing with Fleshbot and thought that he would be a good person to help get this out there," explains John d'Addario, editor of Flesbot.com.
Denton is the blog mogul of the Internet. His Gawker.com, the New York media and gossip site, has acquired a huge following in the two years since going live. Since that time, he's expanded his virtual empire to include Gizmodo.com, a technical and electronics review site, and Fleshbot.com, which covers sex culture, specifically pornography. But Denton's distribution channels never included DVD, until given the opportunity to get these rare Wood films out to the public. Necromania is the first release from Fleshbot Films, which plans to distribute Shotgun Wedding and The Only House in Town shortly. It is available at a special Amazon.com store accessible through Fleshbot's site (http://www.fleshbot.com/necromania.php).
The DVD for Necromania, which was the last film Wood ever directed, comes with, as Wood described it, the "Hot!" version, which is softcore and has been available in poor quality bootlegs for about ten years, and the "Hot! Hot! Hot!" version, featuring full penetration. The X-rated Necromania disappeared after playing a short run at the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City in 1971.
"What the fuck?" is how d'Addario describes first watching Necromania, the story of a couple seeking sexual assistance from the mysterious Madame Heles, played by Maria Aronoff. Aronoff is best known to Mr. Skin fans for her Drive-In Diva exposure in The Godson (1971) (Picture: - - ). Rene Bond and Rick Lutze are the couple with the problem, specifically Lutze's inability to get it up. Rene and Rick were a couple in real life too, and they appeared together in many of the pornographic films that Rene made in the infancy of the adult business.
"She was one of the first adult-industry superstars back in the days before there was a big PR machine behind it," notes d'Addario. "This is a particularly valued pre-boob-job title. She's one of the first adult stars to get a boob job."
Necromania's cast is not credited in the film, however. Wood goes by the pseudonym of Don Miller, while the credit sequence explains that the cast prefers to remain anonymous. Considering the flaccid members and pimpled ass cheeks, it's an understandable request. "I'm hoping that once the film is out there that some vintage-porn fanatic will be able to look at it and say that's blah, blah, blah," says d'Addario.
Until then, viewers will ask who the dark-haired lesbian who confronts Rene in the hallway and proceeds to lick her pubic hair is. Or what of Madame Heles's helper, who wears only a sheer pink baby-doll negligee and masturbates with a skull?
"There's a great detail in the Rudolph Grey book about [Wood] directing Necromania while wearing one of his pink negligees," observes d'Addario. "One of the people that [Grey] quotes mentions that Ed was running around the set in this pink negligee, so I like to think that it was the same one that the chick is wearing in the skull-fucking scene. That mental image of Ed Wood wearing this little pink baby-doll is kind of fun to think about."
A link to the classic period of Wood's filmmaking is Maila "Vampira" Nurmi, whom Wood originally wanted to star as the sexual surrogate Madame Heles. The Madame only appears at the climax of the film, rising topless from a coffin to raise the rubbery pecker of Lutze. He gets into the coffin with the Madame, who engages him in some explicit coffin-popping action, ending with his hard-on spewing as he shouts, "I'm a man!" Maila is quoted in Grey's book as being appalled by what she considered the "career suicide" of the project.
Others were not so discerning. Shotgun Wedding stars Jenny Maxwell, who starred opposite Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii (1961). This later appearance proved Maila's fears correct, as Jenny never appeared in another feature film, though she showed up on the boob tube throughout the '60s. Both Jenny and her husband were murdered in Los Angeles during a robbery in 1981.
Wood wrote Shotgun Wedding as a spec script for the hit TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, and the film begins as such before turning into a musical production. "Calling Shotgun Wedding a porn movie is really overstating it," remarks d'Addario. "It's one of those '60s grindhouse features, just a lot of women running around in Daisy Dukes and negligees; there's not even any nudity in it."
The Only House in Town was made at the same time as Necromania. "I mean literally a week before or after Necromania," d'Addario qualifies. But it doesn't have anything resembling a plot, just dirty hippies squirming around naked, framed between segments of massive-mammed Uschi Digard. While Uschi doesn't engage in any of the hardcore sex, she is naked and, perhaps even more revealing, is exposed in one of her rare speaking roles.
Wood also supported himself toward the end of his life by pumping out hundreds of dirty pulp novels, one of which Necromania is supposedly based on. The novel's title is The Only House, about a suburban home where sexually disturbed individuals go to cure their various issues. But the movie The Only House in Town has little in common with Necromania, adding to the riddle of Ed Wood, truly an enigma that poses more questions the deeper one examines.
At least with the release of Wood's final dirty movies another piece of the puzzle is in place. "It's not just bad filmmaking," opines d'Addario. "It's bad porn as well. Just the way the hardcore stuff is filmed in Necromania, there are those really overlong cunnilingus shots, it's almost as if you're watching an OB/GYN demonstration. I can't really image someone sitting there jerking off to these things, although having written for Fleshbot for a year I'm convinced that people will jerk off to anything."
