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So I was checking the "How did this NOT Get Made" email when I noticed I'd gotten an
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email from Bob Blackburn about the film we recently covered for our Halloween
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bonus episode "I Walk Up Early at the Day I Died". If you haven't heard the
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episode what you need to know is that the filmmaker Ed Wood most known as the
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Angora Sweater Wearing Director of Plan 9 from Outer Space and the Johnny Depp
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portrayal in his bio-pick Ed Wood directed by Tim Burton. So he had written a
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script for a silent film titled "I Walk Up Early at the Day I Died".
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Unfortunately he passed away before he got a chance to make this film. His
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widow Kathy Wood held on to the script even after his death. Years later after
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the bio-pick was made a Greek artist, photographer and massive fan of Ed Wood.
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A Reese Iliopolis offered to make this unproduced film with the help of
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producer Chris Hamley. Kathy agreed to have the film made and she even had a
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camo on the movie. This film predominantly started billy-zing as a craze
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protagonist trying to get his money that he stole back from a cult. The film was
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completed and went through the festival's circuit upon its premiere.
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Unfortunately the distribution company Sink went on pictures who was in charge of
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releasing the film hit financial problems in the late 90s. They went out of
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business and was unable to show this amazing film to the world. Back to the
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email from Bob Blackburn. The name sounded familiar to me because when I was
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doing my research for the show his name popped up in a "Getter Rates" article all
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about the lost Ed Wood movie. He contacted us about our episode after discovering
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the show and today I actually get to virtually sit down and talk to him.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Dude hey hello. Can you hear me? I can hear you yes.
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How you doing? Good are you? I'm good. Not really related to the day I died but I
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did read somewhere that you were involved with the Rick Tells Edward the musical.
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I'd found Rick on Yahoo Edward Yahoo group 10-15 years ago. Even before I started my
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Facebook group and he had posted a link to a couple of songs. I checked him out and
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I went man these are actually really good and I've been working in theater as a
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sound designer along with my radio career so I kind of knew good when I heard
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good sound like ready for Broadway in my estimation so I contacted him and we've
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since become good friends. The script's gone through some different iterations
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where I actually put some money into it and got him and the script writer at that
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time out here to do a couple of workshops and readings and things like that
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with some theater people that I knew who wanted to produce it. They saw a few
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problems with the script. They loved the music but the script had the book had some
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problems with it. Most recently he's done a film treatment screenplay for it. He sees
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it as a musical being filmed because he can kind of expand it. At the stage you're
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kind of stuck with what you can do on stage in the props and the projections and
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all that kind of stuff. But you can do a really cool live musical but you can also
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do a lot with a musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. What do I say?
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I love you.
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I can't such a rush. I never want to.
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We'll start from the beginning just state your name. My name is Bob Blackburn. I wanted to show you this.
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Oh wow. One of these days this is the semi-official DVD release in English.
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Okay. Is you guys had the German version of it? Yeah actually let me grab that one really quick.
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I want to show you. This was the bootleg copy that I'd gotten. Where do you find it?
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It was from a company called J. High. That was the cover that I recognized. But then it had this cover.
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That's interesting. As well and I think that's for the Japanese version of it. Yeah. I heard it was
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released briefly in Japan briefly in Germany legitimately. But on VHS. Yeah.
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I don't think it was ever on the DVD over there. So somebody's probably burned DVD so that it was.
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It was definitely a burnt DVD. It was like the menu was like the Windows Movie Maker,
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or whatever. It was just the file that was uploaded on there. I actually watched it because
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the only thing that's on YouTube right now is that 15 minute. That's a setup thing.
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There's a couple little clips. The whole movie was on there about seven or eight years ago.
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And then it got pulled and I don't know who pulled it because legally I'm not sure who owns it.
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At this point I keep hearing it's a bank in Beverly Hills that had the completion bond.
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Sincuanoon can never pay the bills. Chris Hanley's company was a part of another company.
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I'm not sure the whole structure of staff. I was kind of only involved because of Kathy
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and then Bob Weinberg, her lawyer, who knew Roberta Hanley, Chris's wife.
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Oh yeah. She did a book about the Rolling Stones like some photographs of the Rolling Stones
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and he did a book deal for her. When Kathy started looking around to try and get this maid,
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Bob knew that her husband, Chris, had done some film stuff. So I think that's how we got attached to Chris.
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And Arise supposedly, I've heard two stories. One, he was a house guest of theirs in Beverly Hills or wherever they live.
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And saw a copy of the script. He was coming down for breakfast. He saw a copy of the script on a table.
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And he saw it at the name Ed Wood. And he just, because he is an Ed van, picked it up, read it and asked him what was going on.
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And they said, well, we're trying to get this maid. And he said, I have to direct this.
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And he said, he'd never directed really before. I think it's like the only thing that is actually credited to him.
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There's only two IMDB credits that he has. He was an actor for a student film. And then this movie was his director.
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And I think he did a brilliant job, to be honest with you. For the first time, and you were right in one of your comments about he had an artist eye or a photographer's eye for what he was shooting.
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And I remember he was wearing a little loop type of thing around his jacket when he would go on set.
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And we only went on set a couple of times. But when they were shooting the Earth of Kitsine, we went down to the Breiti Arts Center or wherever they were shooting that.
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And that's the first time Kathy got to meet Billy Zane. And that was the photographs that I sent you of the two of them together.
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And I was obviously when Kathy shot her little cameo up there at the carnival tent or whatever that was.
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Before we get into, I woke up early of the day. I'd want to know more just about you and what your journey was.
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We're going from the Pacific Northwest. My dad was a sports announcer up in Seattle. Seattle Super Sonics from the MBA.
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And I asked the guys for them three, two, one, and the Super Sonics win their first ever MBA Championship of all sales. I am here.
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I would play in a couple bands in the early 80s and didn't have any direction. Then I thought I'd go ahead and get into radio, even though we share the same name.
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By the time I was 33, my music career wasn't going very well. So I got into radio and I actually helped a friend of mine,
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and then the band moved to Los Angeles in 1985. And I kind of went, "Hmm, I could live here, but I didn't have a trade."
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So I ended up going to radio broadcasting school. I worked in Seattle in radio of 1988, as is what's called the board operator,
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which means you push the buttons, you don't talk on the air, but you play the shows and then commercials and the music, the tapes, whatever it was.
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Both of my jobs ended in late 1988. I came down here at Los Angeles to visit one of my sisters who just had her first baby.
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And while I was here, I called up one of my program directors that I'd worked for in Seattle who had relocated here.
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She was engaged to the program director for Kiss FM, which is one of the biggest stations in the U.S.
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I asked her if they needed anybody. She said, "Yeah, but not right away. Could you come down here in a couple months?"
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I did. I moved here to LA. On my first day here with my sister, we drove around in Hollywood looking for an apartment.
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I didn't have a car. The apartment I found was an older building in the heart of Hollywood, brick five-story building.
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I turned out, I found this out a couple years later, that the little lady I used to see walking her dog out front, the building was at Woods, with El Cathy Wood.
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In early 1992, Eric Caden of Hollywood Book and Posters and Johnny Legend started doing this at the Hawaiian Theater down on the east end of Hollywood Boulevard.
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There were public things. They were kind of like a repertoire kind of thing. They would do commercial garden films and stuff, or 40 Second Street kind of films.
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Because that's what Eric was into and that's what Johnny was into. Eric had a really well-known story called Hollywood Book and Posters that was here in Los Angeles in Hollywood for 25, 30 years before he passed away two years ago.
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In 1992, they were doing these. I started going down there just because it was in a walking distance and it was like five bucks for three or four movies.
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Like motorcycle chicks from hell weekend. Those are farming people with pitchforks eating people.
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They called the Ed Woodathon over this one weekend and they were going to be screened all these Ed Wood films as well as having people that had known and worked with Ed come in and do a little talk back session in between some of the movies over a couple of days.
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Also Rudolph Gray's nightmare of X to see it just come out and he flew out here to do book signings and do some events and that weekend was part of that whole thing.
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So this was my real first exposure to Ed my mind in a muddle. I cannot pick five.
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I was aware of who he was. I hadn't even seen plan nine. So I just dove in head first. Now while I was watching these movies, they had a lot of extra stuff like Kenny Duncan's Remington commercials.
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The Remington is so gentle that it can shave the short, close buds off a peach without harming its tender skin.
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And some whole movies and I mean really obscure at stuff as I found out later.
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And also we're screening like the plan nine companion a couple documentaries about Ed and one of the things he's screen was called the incredibly strange film show.
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Now and for movie maker extraordinaire Edward Jr. gets the Jonathan Ross treatment.
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He was posted by Jonathan Ross on the BBC. They did an episode on Ed and Jonathan Ross came to Hollywood and it was like I'm the trail of you know.
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And he interviewed some of the people involved with that including Al Marco, Keltnacott and a couple of other people.
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And one of the people he interviewed was Kathy Wood.
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To my knowledge and I was with him for practically most of the movies. He ended up with nothing.
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She's shown on screen and it says Kathy Wood Ed would widow. I looked at this lady and she looked very familiar and I didn't put two and two together but I mean I you know she looks like the lady in my building.
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And I told the friend of mine that I was sitting next to that and so when I went home that evening I checked the mailbox and said K. Wood I went oh crap.
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That's her.
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She was just like passing neighbors like hi how you doing in a neighbor family is absolutely whether a blah blah blah.
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A couple of times she would be walking down to Hollywood Boulevard about two or three blocks from where I live and where I actually live right now.
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I live right behind 63 83 Yucca which was the apartment where I hadn't Kathy lived during most of the 70s and where I did 1978.
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Then he died a few days later. She'd moved back to the neighborhood into this building because she still had a few friends in the area.
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So I had talked to her a few times and one time we were chatting as we walked down the street and she mentioned that her husband had been a movie director.
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No name or anything like that. We were talking about smoking. She used to smoke. Ed used to smoke.
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Because the building we were living in at that time in 1989 in Hollywood this is kind of a gang infested territory every Friday Saturday night.
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You do your gunshots. You know it's controlled by the 18th street gang.
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We had transvestite hookers in our building and drug dealers and things like that.
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So I knew that her husband was a film director. He must not have been very good for her to be living in the building that we were sharing.
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But anyway, so I bumped into her in the hallway not too long after that and told her about this film screening. She wasn't there.
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There are other people were there. Vampire was there. Paul Marko was there. Conrad Brooks was there. Stephen Apostleau was there. Val De Hansen was there.
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Cinematographer who was still alive was there. Forest Ackerman was there.
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So he had all these Ed wood people and they're all talking about Eddie and all this kind of stuff.
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And she was pissed off that she wasn't invited. Turned out she had burnt a lot of bridges. Also they had tried to get in touch with her.
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But if you didn't know the phone code like ring twice, hang up, call back. You wouldn't pick up the phone. You had to know that and nobody did.
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But I ran into my friend from the stand that I was sitting next to her boyfriend at the whiskey a go go of few months later.
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And he came up to me and he said by the way was that lady Mrs. Wood and I said yeah. And he said well, I heard that Tim Burton is making a movie about her husband.
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I went, oh, okay, I had a feeling she probably didn't know anything about it. So I went down and knocked on her door the next day and asked her. And she said no. And I told her it was Tim Burton.
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And she went, he was big adventure. And I went, yeah, that guy. And he just come off making Batman or Batman too. And she didn't know about it.
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And I asked her she'd like me to find out if that was true and what was going on. And I got in touch with Warner Brothers people.
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And they got me in touch with his office. I spoke with an assistant who said we've been trying to reach Mrs. Wood. We need her to sign some papers because she's a character in the film.
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You're not going to believe the first picture I ever saw. It was a phrase.
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Dracula.
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Oh, that's incredible. That's the first picture I ever saw.
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That is incredible.
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The other people were all public figures. All these people had appeared in public so they could use their images and likenesses without having to pay royalties or fees or whatever.
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But with Kathy, she was a private person. So they needed to get her permission for her to be portrayed in the film. And they wanted to get for a little bit of money.
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I helped her get an entertainment lawyer, Bob Lemberg, who dealt with the Disney people and became her personal lawyer to deal with all the other issues.
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But he did help her because when she got the money, she had been on welfare section 8 and all these social security programs to help her.
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She didn't have a whole lot of money. She just had just enough to eat by.
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And then all of a sudden Disney was going to give her an amount of money, which I to this day don't know exactly how much.
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I guess was close to $100,000.
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The only reason I quote that amount is because when she passed away, Bob and I became her two heirs.
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And we were left a little bit of money that was left over from her estate.
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If you kind of put it in half, it was kind of close to that amount.
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Look less because expenses and hospitalization, funeral and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, after I got to know her a little bit, I would come visit.
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I don't have any family in LA. We just chat.
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Your friend knew then what I know now. There's a lot more questions I would ask her about it about this and the other thing.
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I would have spooked her because she was afraid of fanboys. She didn't like people coming around and asking all these questions about it.
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Because she always felt that somebody was out to get something from her.
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Because she kind of been ripped off. They'd been poor and broke pretty much most all of their married life.
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You know, one step ahead of the landlord and the alcoholism and the downward spiral of the day they get evicted from the apartment three days later, he's dead.
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I was never that way. I just felt this little old lady needed to be helped a little bit.
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If I could, I'd take her to the grocery store and we just kind of became friends.
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And she would tell me stories occasionally. And I didn't really cry.
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But at some point, she trusted me. That's probably about maybe six or seven months into our friendship.
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She asked me to go to her hallway closet and get a suitcase out of the shelf up above.
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So I did. I brought it down. This old kind of battered leather suitcase and she opened it up and rifled through some stuff.
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As I found out later, that was the suitcase that they took with them when they left the apartment.
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They only had the clothes on their back and this one little suitcase that had a few papers in it.
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And among the papers was the manuscript for Hollywood rat race. And the script for I woke up early the day I died.
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She allowed me to take each one of them separately, of course, back to my apartment to read.
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I kind of went, oh, this is a gold money, you know, for Edward Finns.
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It's like an unpublished manuscript as close to an autobiography as Ed Everrode.
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And then an unmade film. Of course, I found out later on Chris Posteloff that Ed actually had sold the script to his dad.
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So I've seen the sign contract at Chris's house over in Las Vegas along with some other films that never got made like the basketballers.
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These kind of TNA films that a Posteloff was well known for making.
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As you see, I woke up early as not a TNA film at all.
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A Posteloff senior, he gave that two or three hundred dollars for a script and you know, here go buy a bottle of booze and pay some bills or whatever.
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But Kathy assumed that she owned it because it was in the suitcase and then that's when Bob started this whole process of trying to get this thing made.
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And I was there the day that a Reese came over to meet Kathy for the very first time, which was the Polaroid photo I sent to you of him with his arms around her.
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And he's like the octopus strikes, you know.
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He won her over, she said, sure, okay, we'll let you do it. And there you go.
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You mentioned that you were around like a few days of the production just a little bit. Yeah, yeah.
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And a recent bite of this down there when they were taping the Earth a kid thing.
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I'm just disappointed that we didn't because Kathy would get tired out a little bit easily.
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But at this point, she was in her mid to late 70s.
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After an hour or so of being on her feet or just, you know, being out, she kind of want to get home.
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So we stuck around a little bit and saw them shooting some of the scenes talking to Billy and talking to Erise, seeing the set and the production behind the scenes, you know, all that kind of stuff.
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Of course she had a cameo scene set up for the evening night time shooting out at the Nate Holden State Park out near a crinchod.
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You can see the jet flying in from LAX over the hill top that we were on where they set up the carnival pants and everything.
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And we got out there and Erise was there and got her to the production trailer and make up and stuff.
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Got her the dress that she wore and they gave her this really bad wig.
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She hated the wig and she was never one to hold back her feeling. She was Irish.
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So I had always called her Ohera.
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I guess that was his nickname for her was just her maiden name Ohera.
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So I was lucky enough to see that twice in screenings and that was one correction I wanted to give to you too.
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You guys said that it screened for Kathy at the Chinese theater.
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Actually no, the original cast and crew screening that was for Kathy more or less was at the Paramount film lot.
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And this is where I got a chance to introduce Kathy to Tippie Headroom.
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I don't have a picture. That's my one big regret in life.
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But it did screen at the Chinese theater as part of the AFI film festival.
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Oh wow.
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And I have the program that still has the listing of the thing.
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And so we went down there. Karen Black was there and Erise was there and I think some other people.
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And then it filmed crews and Kathy actually did a couple little on screen interviews.
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As far as regards Ed and his films so many people take so much different things away from his work, the man and everything.
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And unfortunately the 1994 Ed Wood film kind of created this template for what most people think Ed was like, this hyperactive, whatever.
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Well, he may have been that a little bit in the early days, but he was a functioning alcoholic during most of his career.
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And most of his film career was done until he started working with a post lot.
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He was a pioneer in the porn industry.
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He was making the loops, the millimeter loops with people like Johnny Wad and John Holmes in the early 70s.
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And I guess you deserve some recognition for that personally.
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I'm more into the literature side of stuff. I've been getting these two volumes of his short fiction out from when he was writing for Bernie Bloom and Pendleton Publishing.
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And I've actually helped get two books published of his short stories, nearly 90 plus stories.
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And I have another book of his quote unquote articles, which are essays coming out in the next month or two.
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I've actually been working on a memoir of myself with Kathy.
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What I can remember and notes that I took after she passed away and just all that kind of stuff, which the publisher who did the anthology called Angora Fever suggest to me said,
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"You've got an interesting backstory. Why don't you tell your story about how you met Kathy and all that kind of thing?"
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And I went, "Yeah, yeah, uh, okay, so I decided to go ahead and do it."
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Also, you guys called Dolores Ed's first wife. They were never married.
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They were together for two or three years, boyfriend and girlfriend.
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She wrote a really good autobiography called The Fuller Life. That was her last name.
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And I'd suggest reading that too because she had a fascinating career after Ed. She became a songwriter and wrote some songs for Elvis.
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Dad was married briefly to a woman named Norma McCarty who plays the stewardess in plan 9.
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Okay. Mayday. Mayday. Stand by for her bank tower. You should pose a pass and just like that.
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I doubt it. Most of them were asleep. But it was quite a joke, Jeff. I'll check.
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Good. We'll get a metaphor landing. Keep it quiet until we get instructions.
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We kicked that out because when she found out he was transvestite, she had a young son who was seven or eight from a previous marriage.
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She didn't know if Ed was gay and child molester or whatever. So anyway, she kicked Ed out.
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Ed told Kathy after they met and got together that marriage had been unknowled.
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We don't know that. Norma came back years later for a probate thing with Wade Williams paying her legal fees to try and steal the estate from Kathy.
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We're not sure if he was a person. We're never actually married. Kathy did have a sweater at one point that Rudolph gray ended up with.
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He also ended up with some Ed's personal paperbacks and the lawyer had to hit them returned.
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And then he and I split those books between us when Kathy passed away.
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Oh, wow. Here's two of them.
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Oh, my God. Yeah. They're inscribed from the personal library of Edward D. Wood Jr.
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That's amazing. And I actually own the suitcase now. It's in my closet. It's where I keep all my Edward memorabilian stuff and everything.
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Plus I had this wallet. No money in it, of course. For me, my quest is to try and find all of this lost stuff.
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A lot of people ask me, what about the books, the novels? Are they going to be coming back out? It's a legal mess.
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The legal complications are so crazy. We don't know who owns anything. Did Ed write on spec and then sell it to a publisher.
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Was he a writer for hire? Who owns the actual stories? We don't know. I mean, I'm probably breaking the law by putting out these short fictions, but the publishers were owned by them all.
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So I don't think they're going to come after me, you know, for a couple hundred bucks and royalties unless they're really, really desperate.
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There's a book and I think it's the misunderstood adventures of Edward with some film writers wrote about all Ed's films.
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And they actually said that I woke up early. It's the best Ed would film made. Andrew Roush, one of the members in my group.
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There's an interview with Arise in the book. Do you know where Arise is now? He's in New York. Do you know what he's doing?
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He's still doing his artwork. He does sculpture, photography, visual arts. I have no idea how he gets his money and what he does. The last time I physically saw him was about three or four years ago.
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He comes out to LA every so often. He has a place. He stays at Palm Springs and has a bunch of friends out there. But we had lunch over near the Formosa Cafe.
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And this is when he told me he has a 35 millimeter print of the film. Oh, man. Yeah. I would love to get it shown at the New York Quentin Tarantino Theater.
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But the problem is you'd have to do it on the down low as the kids say. And I always thought it should have been screened at the Egyptian along with the Tim Burton film or out at the cemetery when they do their screenings out at the cemetery.
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I always thought this would make a great midnight movie, just like Rocky Horror. You know, and get the kids to shout the lines along, 'cause there are no lines to shout, but it's something to that of that.
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It definitely has that feel to it of like, yeah, Rocky Horror or even like midnight screenings of the room.
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Plan 9 is definitely one of those films where Edwood just has this ability creating these films that are, they were memorable and they were just like, it sticks with you. And I think that's what drew me and attracted me to this film.
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Like, the way I found it was just a simple Google search. I was looking up like, horror films that didn't get made. There was an Edwood film that actually like fully got made from the beginning all the way to the end.
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And it fizzled away. And I was like, that is a much more interesting story. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Absolutely.
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I'm always for these films like with the room, like with Rocky Horror picture. It's like that experience in the theater with that.
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We see this with Plan 9. I guess if you're watching like, Plan 9 from Outer Space or if you're watching an Edwood film, what is something that audiences should really take away from it or try and look for a notice?
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And like, what's a way that we can, I guess, honor him when we watch these films?
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I just wish people could actually see, I woke up early on a big screen, the soundtrack is amazing when you hear it loud. It's powerful, it's a lot of rock and roll.
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To me that was half the fun because I'm more into music than I am and to film to be honest with you.
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I've seen some of his films in the big screen with audiences and some people laugh at them. It's a joke. Edwood is a joke. I don't think he is or was a joke.
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They made him a star that may be kind of in the wrong way, but Kathy always said that he would have loved the attention. He would absolutely have loved that, but she also didn't get it.
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On a similar level with the room in Tommy Wiseau when he first came out with the room and the fandom that arose from it in Vox, they put out a video all about the room and talking about bad movies, but why do we love them?
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And he brought up this really interesting question of like, if it is a bad movie, I should not want to watch it.
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And yet I watch the room at least like 35 times a year. So why is it that something that brings me so much joy is considered terrible?
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Why do you pause at a car crash when you're driving down the freeway and all the lucky lose, right? It's like, what drives you to that?
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You said, some more kind of a thing. It's like, I love car crashes. I'm not going to deny it. Yeah, you know, oh God, there's blood on the floor. Oh my God, is the worst movie ever made?
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I think what draws us to Ed, and I think we saw in the biopic as well as that he was someone that pushed forward no matter what he had this tenacity about him where he's like, I'm going to be a filmmaker no matter what the cost, no matter what it takes.
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This is what I'm going to do. And it reflected in his movies. It was like a piece of scene who he really was like even in a movie like Glen or Glenda, like one of the more autobiographical movies about him.
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And yet no one knew that this is who he really was. And yet he put it out for everyone to see in the most vulnerable time. And especially in a time where dressing in women's clothing was not something that was not the most important.
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It was something that was widely accepted. Still illegal at that point, too, in the early 50s here in California. It was legal in the 60s. And he writes about that a little bit in some of these short stories and articles that I collected during the 60s and early 70s.
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And he actually not be arrested, but he was way out in the 50s and would be surely go down to the bar or go to a meeting, add surely and stuff like that. But I think part of that was he was drunk.
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You know, see you get to a certain point where you just sound care in his Hollywood. You know what I mean? This is a town known for somebody having a pet panther and walking it down the boulevard, right?
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And I think that's why I celebrate the weirdos here. Exactly. And weirdos celebrate each other. So it misdivised me. But I'm so glad that I kind of became a part of this whole world because it's made my life more interesting.
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I know in years what I thought that I'd be one of the errors to Edward's estate, whatever that means. I tell people half and nothing is nothing planned for and a half from outer space. That would be me.
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That's what makes it really frustrating for me is because there's so much of his work that I think deserves to be put out there. And you see people putting it out, but illegally, I don't think they know that there's an estate of Edward.
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You know, most people just assume there's not. And so we rarely, if ever, even get alerted to the fact that somebody has done a reprint of Black Lives drag in Spain or people are doing bootleg books, I bought a copy of Side Show Siren on Amazon for $30 plus dollars just to see if I could track down who the publisher was.
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But I could print on demand book. I can't stop it because I can't claim that I own the copyright to that book. I can just put my review up and say, by the way, this is a bootleg pirated book and the estate of Edward does not condone this nor do we make any money off of it.
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I mean, I'm one of the people that benefited from a bootleg for sure, but like it was the only way I could get it.
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Yeah, yeah, I know I totally get that and I totally understand that there is a demand for his stuff to be out there. And I'm trying to do what little bit I can with these short stories and these other things.
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Chris for a possible off when I talk to him, he even brought to the subject of maybe getting the money together to buy the film back and then releasing it.
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That's a possibility too. I have no idea. I really know. Sometimes when the pandemic is over, I'll invite you over and I'll show you because yours probably has all the script in German, right?
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Yes, it does. The first time I saw that I went, what the is this? This is wrong? Because it's all in English. It's, you know, it's typed in English. People need to see the English version of it just because.
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It's a star-studded cast. Absolutely. That's the thing that surprised me was like how many well-known people are in here. This is Billy Zane around the time that he was doing Titanic.
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No, I know. It was the first movie that he did after Titanic.
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I'm glad I got that timeline right because I was trying to figure out like when in his career he was doing it because he looks pretty much the same age as he was in Titanic.
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And he's wearing a wig. If you saw the photos, it kind of has a shape. That obviously has a bad wig that he wears in the film. A good bad wig.
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And if this movie gets released, like I think people will look at him and be like this is probably peak Billy Zane.
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Anybody home? Come on, everybody. Time to play.
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Hello. Of all the performances and I remember watching this movie the first time even when it was sped up and I was like this is insane.
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I watched the clip of him robbing the lone center. And I was like I love this. I love what he's doing and the energy that he brings to it.
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The lone center building actually is on the corner of Hollywood and Coalanga and I used to walk by it all the time.
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And across the street was the small theater called theater theater where in the Edward film they shot casual company. They showed the exterior shot a casual company.
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Now just watching the clip the other night when the thief enters the bank loan building. There's a car parked on the street beyond that is the theater theater building, which is no longer there.
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It became a Greyhound bus depot. Now it's just a parking lot. For me it was kind of fun to know that both of those films had that one little and it's like two blocks from where Kathy and I lived.
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Oh wow. So it's just right down the street.
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I think that's everything that I needed to mind is there anything else that we may have missed.
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You guys mentioned something about Ed watching silent films, which is why this is a silent film. I don't think that's honest to be.
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I mean Ed worked in a movie theater but that was in the 30s, maybe 1940, whatever when he was a teenager at the barred of long theater there in Piquizzi.
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Yes, but Pyeongs was one of his favorite actors and obviously Bayla. I wonder and I'm sure you've wondered is like how would Ed have made this movie?
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How much sound would have been in the movie? Would music have been used when there have been a score? Would sound effects have been used?
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Or would they just grunt instead of talking? And if you get a chance to read the script that I sent you, you'll see how close a Reese followed the script.
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You'll read the script and you go, you did that shot just the way Ed wanted it to be shot.
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You know the only thing that was different was adding the sound and some of the found footage and then also the notes.
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Now I don't know if the typewriter notes were written into the script, in that aspect it was like a silent movie like with title cards.
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So that you'd know that the villain is you know taking Pauline away into the sawmill and gonna put her on the saw and blah blah blah.
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And it was the same way like well the thief does this and he does that and he does that and does that to move the exposition of the story along also is a space saver.
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So you don't have to spend all that extra money filming those other scenes and you are right in the assumption that once people heard that there was this unproduced Ed would film out there to be made.
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Everybody wanted to be in it. It's a wonderful film. I just hope it gets out there.
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This is a great film that more people need to see. Well thank you so much for your time for your stories. This has been incredible.
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Yeah. Adios, mi cha cha.
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[Music]
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So I was checking the "How did this NOT Get Made" email when I noticed I'd gotten an
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email from Bob Blackburn about the film we recently covered for our Halloween
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bonus episode "I Walk Up Early at the Day I Died". If you haven't heard the
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episode what you need to know is that the filmmaker Ed Wood most known as the
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Angora Sweater Wearing Director of Plan 9 from Outer Space and the Johnny Depp
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portrayal in his bio-pick Ed Wood directed by Tim Burton. So he had written a
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script for a silent film titled "I Walk Up Early at the Day I Died".
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Unfortunately he passed away before he got a chance to make this film. His
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widow Kathy Wood held on to the script even after his death. Years later after
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the bio-pick was made a Greek artist, photographer and massive fan of Ed Wood.
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A Reese Iliopolis offered to make this unproduced film with the help of
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producer Chris Hamley. Kathy agreed to have the film made and she even had a
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camo on the movie. This film predominantly started billy-zing as a craze
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protagonist trying to get his money that he stole back from a cult. The film was
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completed and went through the festival's circuit upon its premiere.
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Unfortunately the distribution company Sink went on pictures who was in charge of
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releasing the film hit financial problems in the late 90s. They went out of
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business and was unable to show this amazing film to the world. Back to the
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email from Bob Blackburn. The name sounded familiar to me because when I was
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doing my research for the show his name popped up in a "Getter Rates" article all
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about the lost Ed Wood movie. He contacted us about our episode after discovering
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the show and today I actually get to virtually sit down and talk to him.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Dude hey hello. Can you hear me? I can hear you yes.
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How you doing? Good are you? I'm good. Not really related to the day I died but I
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did read somewhere that you were involved with the Rick Tells Edward the musical.
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I'd found Rick on Yahoo Edward Yahoo group 10-15 years ago. Even before I started my
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Facebook group and he had posted a link to a couple of songs. I checked him out and
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I went man these are actually really good and I've been working in theater as a
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sound designer along with my radio career so I kind of knew good when I heard
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good sound like ready for Broadway in my estimation so I contacted him and we've
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since become good friends. The script's gone through some different iterations
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where I actually put some money into it and got him and the script writer at that
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time out here to do a couple of workshops and readings and things like that
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with some theater people that I knew who wanted to produce it. They saw a few
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problems with the script. They loved the music but the script had the book had some
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problems with it. Most recently he's done a film treatment screenplay for it. He sees
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it as a musical being filmed because he can kind of expand it. At the stage you're
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kind of stuck with what you can do on stage in the props and the projections and
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all that kind of stuff. But you can do a really cool live musical but you can also
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do a lot with a musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. What do I say?
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I love you.
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I can't such a rush. I never want to.
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We'll start from the beginning just state your name. My name is Bob Blackburn. I wanted to show you this.
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Oh wow. One of these days this is the semi-official DVD release in English.
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Okay. Is you guys had the German version of it? Yeah actually let me grab that one really quick.
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I want to show you. This was the bootleg copy that I'd gotten. Where do you find it?
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It was from a company called J. High. That was the cover that I recognized. But then it had this cover.
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That's interesting. As well and I think that's for the Japanese version of it. Yeah. I heard it was
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released briefly in Japan briefly in Germany legitimately. But on VHS. Yeah.
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I don't think it was ever on the DVD over there. So somebody's probably burned DVD so that it was.
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It was definitely a burnt DVD. It was like the menu was like the Windows Movie Maker,
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or whatever. It was just the file that was uploaded on there. I actually watched it because
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the only thing that's on YouTube right now is that 15 minute. That's a setup thing.
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There's a couple little clips. The whole movie was on there about seven or eight years ago.
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And then it got pulled and I don't know who pulled it because legally I'm not sure who owns it.
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At this point I keep hearing it's a bank in Beverly Hills that had the completion bond.
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Sincuanoon can never pay the bills. Chris Hanley's company was a part of another company.
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I'm not sure the whole structure of staff. I was kind of only involved because of Kathy
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and then Bob Weinberg, her lawyer, who knew Roberta Hanley, Chris's wife.
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Oh yeah. She did a book about the Rolling Stones like some photographs of the Rolling Stones
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and he did a book deal for her. When Kathy started looking around to try and get this maid,
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Bob knew that her husband, Chris, had done some film stuff. So I think that's how we got attached to Chris.
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And Arise supposedly, I've heard two stories. One, he was a house guest of theirs in Beverly Hills or wherever they live.
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And saw a copy of the script. He was coming down for breakfast. He saw a copy of the script on a table.
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And he saw it at the name Ed Wood. And he just, because he is an Ed van, picked it up, read it and asked him what was going on.
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And they said, well, we're trying to get this maid. And he said, I have to direct this.
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And he said, he'd never directed really before. I think it's like the only thing that is actually credited to him.
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There's only two IMDB credits that he has. He was an actor for a student film. And then this movie was his director.
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And I think he did a brilliant job, to be honest with you. For the first time, and you were right in one of your comments about he had an artist eye or a photographer's eye for what he was shooting.
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And I remember he was wearing a little loop type of thing around his jacket when he would go on set.
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And we only went on set a couple of times. But when they were shooting the Earth of Kitsine, we went down to the Breiti Arts Center or wherever they were shooting that.
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And that's the first time Kathy got to meet Billy Zane. And that was the photographs that I sent you of the two of them together.
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And I was obviously when Kathy shot her little cameo up there at the carnival tent or whatever that was.
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Before we get into, I woke up early of the day. I'd want to know more just about you and what your journey was.
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We're going from the Pacific Northwest. My dad was a sports announcer up in Seattle. Seattle Super Sonics from the MBA.
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And I asked the guys for them three, two, one, and the Super Sonics win their first ever MBA Championship of all sales. I am here.
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I would play in a couple bands in the early 80s and didn't have any direction. Then I thought I'd go ahead and get into radio, even though we share the same name.
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By the time I was 33, my music career wasn't going very well. So I got into radio and I actually helped a friend of mine,
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and then the band moved to Los Angeles in 1985. And I kind of went, "Hmm, I could live here, but I didn't have a trade."
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So I ended up going to radio broadcasting school. I worked in Seattle in radio of 1988, as is what's called the board operator,
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which means you push the buttons, you don't talk on the air, but you play the shows and then commercials and the music, the tapes, whatever it was.
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Both of my jobs ended in late 1988. I came down here at Los Angeles to visit one of my sisters who just had her first baby.
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And while I was here, I called up one of my program directors that I'd worked for in Seattle who had relocated here.
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She was engaged to the program director for Kiss FM, which is one of the biggest stations in the U.S.
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I asked her if they needed anybody. She said, "Yeah, but not right away. Could you come down here in a couple months?"
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I did. I moved here to LA. On my first day here with my sister, we drove around in Hollywood looking for an apartment.
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I didn't have a car. The apartment I found was an older building in the heart of Hollywood, brick five-story building.
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I turned out, I found this out a couple years later, that the little lady I used to see walking her dog out front, the building was at Woods, with El Cathy Wood.
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In early 1992, Eric Caden of Hollywood Book and Posters and Johnny Legend started doing this at the Hawaiian Theater down on the east end of Hollywood Boulevard.
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There were public things. They were kind of like a repertoire kind of thing. They would do commercial garden films and stuff, or 40 Second Street kind of films.
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Because that's what Eric was into and that's what Johnny was into. Eric had a really well-known story called Hollywood Book and Posters that was here in Los Angeles in Hollywood for 25, 30 years before he passed away two years ago.
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In 1992, they were doing these. I started going down there just because it was in a walking distance and it was like five bucks for three or four movies.
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Like motorcycle chicks from hell weekend. Those are farming people with pitchforks eating people.
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They called the Ed Woodathon over this one weekend and they were going to be screened all these Ed Wood films as well as having people that had known and worked with Ed come in and do a little talk back session in between some of the movies over a couple of days.
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Also Rudolph Gray's nightmare of X to see it just come out and he flew out here to do book signings and do some events and that weekend was part of that whole thing.
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So this was my real first exposure to Ed my mind in a muddle. I cannot pick five.
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I was aware of who he was. I hadn't even seen plan nine. So I just dove in head first. Now while I was watching these movies, they had a lot of extra stuff like Kenny Duncan's Remington commercials.
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The Remington is so gentle that it can shave the short, close buds off a peach without harming its tender skin.
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And some whole movies and I mean really obscure at stuff as I found out later.
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And also we're screening like the plan nine companion a couple documentaries about Ed and one of the things he's screen was called the incredibly strange film show.
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Now and for movie maker extraordinaire Edward Jr. gets the Jonathan Ross treatment.
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He was posted by Jonathan Ross on the BBC. They did an episode on Ed and Jonathan Ross came to Hollywood and it was like I'm the trail of you know.
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And he interviewed some of the people involved with that including Al Marco, Keltnacott and a couple of other people.
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And one of the people he interviewed was Kathy Wood.
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To my knowledge and I was with him for practically most of the movies. He ended up with nothing.
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She's shown on screen and it says Kathy Wood Ed would widow. I looked at this lady and she looked very familiar and I didn't put two and two together but I mean I you know she looks like the lady in my building.
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And I told the friend of mine that I was sitting next to that and so when I went home that evening I checked the mailbox and said K. Wood I went oh crap.
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That's her.
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She was just like passing neighbors like hi how you doing in a neighbor family is absolutely whether a blah blah blah.
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A couple of times she would be walking down to Hollywood Boulevard about two or three blocks from where I live and where I actually live right now.
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I live right behind 63 83 Yucca which was the apartment where I hadn't Kathy lived during most of the 70s and where I did 1978.
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Then he died a few days later. She'd moved back to the neighborhood into this building because she still had a few friends in the area.
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So I had talked to her a few times and one time we were chatting as we walked down the street and she mentioned that her husband had been a movie director.
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No name or anything like that. We were talking about smoking. She used to smoke. Ed used to smoke.
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Because the building we were living in at that time in 1989 in Hollywood this is kind of a gang infested territory every Friday Saturday night.
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You do your gunshots. You know it's controlled by the 18th street gang.
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We had transvestite hookers in our building and drug dealers and things like that.
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So I knew that her husband was a film director. He must not have been very good for her to be living in the building that we were sharing.
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But anyway, so I bumped into her in the hallway not too long after that and told her about this film screening. She wasn't there.
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There are other people were there. Vampire was there. Paul Marko was there. Conrad Brooks was there. Stephen Apostleau was there. Val De Hansen was there.
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Cinematographer who was still alive was there. Forest Ackerman was there.
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So he had all these Ed wood people and they're all talking about Eddie and all this kind of stuff.
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And she was pissed off that she wasn't invited. Turned out she had burnt a lot of bridges. Also they had tried to get in touch with her.
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But if you didn't know the phone code like ring twice, hang up, call back. You wouldn't pick up the phone. You had to know that and nobody did.
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But I ran into my friend from the stand that I was sitting next to her boyfriend at the whiskey a go go of few months later.
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And he came up to me and he said by the way was that lady Mrs. Wood and I said yeah. And he said well, I heard that Tim Burton is making a movie about her husband.
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I went, oh, okay, I had a feeling she probably didn't know anything about it. So I went down and knocked on her door the next day and asked her. And she said no. And I told her it was Tim Burton.
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And she went, he was big adventure. And I went, yeah, that guy. And he just come off making Batman or Batman too. And she didn't know about it.
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And I asked her she'd like me to find out if that was true and what was going on. And I got in touch with Warner Brothers people.
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And they got me in touch with his office. I spoke with an assistant who said we've been trying to reach Mrs. Wood. We need her to sign some papers because she's a character in the film.
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You're not going to believe the first picture I ever saw. It was a phrase.
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Dracula.
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Oh, that's incredible. That's the first picture I ever saw.
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That is incredible.
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The other people were all public figures. All these people had appeared in public so they could use their images and likenesses without having to pay royalties or fees or whatever.
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But with Kathy, she was a private person. So they needed to get her permission for her to be portrayed in the film. And they wanted to get for a little bit of money.
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I helped her get an entertainment lawyer, Bob Lemberg, who dealt with the Disney people and became her personal lawyer to deal with all the other issues.
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But he did help her because when she got the money, she had been on welfare section 8 and all these social security programs to help her.
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She didn't have a whole lot of money. She just had just enough to eat by.
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And then all of a sudden Disney was going to give her an amount of money, which I to this day don't know exactly how much.
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I guess was close to $100,000.
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The only reason I quote that amount is because when she passed away, Bob and I became her two heirs.
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And we were left a little bit of money that was left over from her estate.
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If you kind of put it in half, it was kind of close to that amount.
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Look less because expenses and hospitalization, funeral and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, after I got to know her a little bit, I would come visit.
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I don't have any family in LA. We just chat.
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Your friend knew then what I know now. There's a lot more questions I would ask her about it about this and the other thing.
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I would have spooked her because she was afraid of fanboys. She didn't like people coming around and asking all these questions about it.
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Because she always felt that somebody was out to get something from her.
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Because she kind of been ripped off. They'd been poor and broke pretty much most all of their married life.
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You know, one step ahead of the landlord and the alcoholism and the downward spiral of the day they get evicted from the apartment three days later, he's dead.
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I was never that way. I just felt this little old lady needed to be helped a little bit.
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If I could, I'd take her to the grocery store and we just kind of became friends.
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And she would tell me stories occasionally. And I didn't really cry.
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But at some point, she trusted me. That's probably about maybe six or seven months into our friendship.
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She asked me to go to her hallway closet and get a suitcase out of the shelf up above.
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So I did. I brought it down. This old kind of battered leather suitcase and she opened it up and rifled through some stuff.
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As I found out later, that was the suitcase that they took with them when they left the apartment.
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They only had the clothes on their back and this one little suitcase that had a few papers in it.
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And among the papers was the manuscript for Hollywood rat race. And the script for I woke up early the day I died.
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She allowed me to take each one of them separately, of course, back to my apartment to read.
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I kind of went, oh, this is a gold money, you know, for Edward Finns.
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It's like an unpublished manuscript as close to an autobiography as Ed Everrode.
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And then an unmade film. Of course, I found out later on Chris Posteloff that Ed actually had sold the script to his dad.
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So I've seen the sign contract at Chris's house over in Las Vegas along with some other films that never got made like the basketballers.
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These kind of TNA films that a Posteloff was well known for making.
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As you see, I woke up early as not a TNA film at all.
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A Posteloff senior, he gave that two or three hundred dollars for a script and you know, here go buy a bottle of booze and pay some bills or whatever.
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But Kathy assumed that she owned it because it was in the suitcase and then that's when Bob started this whole process of trying to get this thing made.
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And I was there the day that a Reese came over to meet Kathy for the very first time, which was the Polaroid photo I sent to you of him with his arms around her.
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And he's like the octopus strikes, you know.
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He won her over, she said, sure, okay, we'll let you do it. And there you go.
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You mentioned that you were around like a few days of the production just a little bit. Yeah, yeah.
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And a recent bite of this down there when they were taping the Earth a kid thing.
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I'm just disappointed that we didn't because Kathy would get tired out a little bit easily.
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But at this point, she was in her mid to late 70s.
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After an hour or so of being on her feet or just, you know, being out, she kind of want to get home.
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So we stuck around a little bit and saw them shooting some of the scenes talking to Billy and talking to Erise, seeing the set and the production behind the scenes, you know, all that kind of stuff.
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Of course she had a cameo scene set up for the evening night time shooting out at the Nate Holden State Park out near a crinchod.
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You can see the jet flying in from LAX over the hill top that we were on where they set up the carnival pants and everything.
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And we got out there and Erise was there and got her to the production trailer and make up and stuff.
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Got her the dress that she wore and they gave her this really bad wig.
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She hated the wig and she was never one to hold back her feeling. She was Irish.
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So I had always called her Ohera.
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I guess that was his nickname for her was just her maiden name Ohera.
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So I was lucky enough to see that twice in screenings and that was one correction I wanted to give to you too.
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You guys said that it screened for Kathy at the Chinese theater.
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Actually no, the original cast and crew screening that was for Kathy more or less was at the Paramount film lot.
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And this is where I got a chance to introduce Kathy to Tippie Headroom.
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I don't have a picture. That's my one big regret in life.
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But it did screen at the Chinese theater as part of the AFI film festival.
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Oh wow.
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And I have the program that still has the listing of the thing.
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And so we went down there. Karen Black was there and Erise was there and I think some other people.
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And then it filmed crews and Kathy actually did a couple little on screen interviews.
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As far as regards Ed and his films so many people take so much different things away from his work, the man and everything.
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And unfortunately the 1994 Ed Wood film kind of created this template for what most people think Ed was like, this hyperactive, whatever.
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Well, he may have been that a little bit in the early days, but he was a functioning alcoholic during most of his career.
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And most of his film career was done until he started working with a post lot.
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He was a pioneer in the porn industry.
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He was making the loops, the millimeter loops with people like Johnny Wad and John Holmes in the early 70s.
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And I guess you deserve some recognition for that personally.
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I'm more into the literature side of stuff. I've been getting these two volumes of his short fiction out from when he was writing for Bernie Bloom and Pendleton Publishing.
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And I've actually helped get two books published of his short stories, nearly 90 plus stories.
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And I have another book of his quote unquote articles, which are essays coming out in the next month or two.
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I've actually been working on a memoir of myself with Kathy.
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What I can remember and notes that I took after she passed away and just all that kind of stuff, which the publisher who did the anthology called Angora Fever suggest to me said,
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"You've got an interesting backstory. Why don't you tell your story about how you met Kathy and all that kind of thing?"
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And I went, "Yeah, yeah, uh, okay, so I decided to go ahead and do it."
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Also, you guys called Dolores Ed's first wife. They were never married.
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They were together for two or three years, boyfriend and girlfriend.
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She wrote a really good autobiography called The Fuller Life. That was her last name.
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And I'd suggest reading that too because she had a fascinating career after Ed. She became a songwriter and wrote some songs for Elvis.
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Dad was married briefly to a woman named Norma McCarty who plays the stewardess in plan 9.
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Okay. Mayday. Mayday. Stand by for her bank tower. You should pose a pass and just like that.
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I doubt it. Most of them were asleep. But it was quite a joke, Jeff. I'll check.
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Good. We'll get a metaphor landing. Keep it quiet until we get instructions.
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We kicked that out because when she found out he was transvestite, she had a young son who was seven or eight from a previous marriage.
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She didn't know if Ed was gay and child molester or whatever. So anyway, she kicked Ed out.
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Ed told Kathy after they met and got together that marriage had been unknowled.
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We don't know that. Norma came back years later for a probate thing with Wade Williams paying her legal fees to try and steal the estate from Kathy.
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We're not sure if he was a person. We're never actually married. Kathy did have a sweater at one point that Rudolph gray ended up with.
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He also ended up with some Ed's personal paperbacks and the lawyer had to hit them returned.
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And then he and I split those books between us when Kathy passed away.
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Oh, wow. Here's two of them.
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Oh, my God. Yeah. They're inscribed from the personal library of Edward D. Wood Jr.
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That's amazing. And I actually own the suitcase now. It's in my closet. It's where I keep all my Edward memorabilian stuff and everything.
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Plus I had this wallet. No money in it, of course. For me, my quest is to try and find all of this lost stuff.
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A lot of people ask me, what about the books, the novels? Are they going to be coming back out? It's a legal mess.
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The legal complications are so crazy. We don't know who owns anything. Did Ed write on spec and then sell it to a publisher.
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Was he a writer for hire? Who owns the actual stories? We don't know. I mean, I'm probably breaking the law by putting out these short fictions, but the publishers were owned by them all.
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So I don't think they're going to come after me, you know, for a couple hundred bucks and royalties unless they're really, really desperate.
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There's a book and I think it's the misunderstood adventures of Edward with some film writers wrote about all Ed's films.
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And they actually said that I woke up early. It's the best Ed would film made. Andrew Roush, one of the members in my group.
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There's an interview with Arise in the book. Do you know where Arise is now? He's in New York. Do you know what he's doing?
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He's still doing his artwork. He does sculpture, photography, visual arts. I have no idea how he gets his money and what he does. The last time I physically saw him was about three or four years ago.
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He comes out to LA every so often. He has a place. He stays at Palm Springs and has a bunch of friends out there. But we had lunch over near the Formosa Cafe.
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And this is when he told me he has a 35 millimeter print of the film. Oh, man. Yeah. I would love to get it shown at the New York Quentin Tarantino Theater.
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But the problem is you'd have to do it on the down low as the kids say. And I always thought it should have been screened at the Egyptian along with the Tim Burton film or out at the cemetery when they do their screenings out at the cemetery.
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I always thought this would make a great midnight movie, just like Rocky Horror. You know, and get the kids to shout the lines along, 'cause there are no lines to shout, but it's something to that of that.
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It definitely has that feel to it of like, yeah, Rocky Horror or even like midnight screenings of the room.
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Plan 9 is definitely one of those films where Edwood just has this ability creating these films that are, they were memorable and they were just like, it sticks with you. And I think that's what drew me and attracted me to this film.
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Like, the way I found it was just a simple Google search. I was looking up like, horror films that didn't get made. There was an Edwood film that actually like fully got made from the beginning all the way to the end.
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And it fizzled away. And I was like, that is a much more interesting story. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Absolutely.
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I'm always for these films like with the room, like with Rocky Horror picture. It's like that experience in the theater with that.
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We see this with Plan 9. I guess if you're watching like, Plan 9 from Outer Space or if you're watching an Edwood film, what is something that audiences should really take away from it or try and look for a notice?
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And like, what's a way that we can, I guess, honor him when we watch these films?
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I just wish people could actually see, I woke up early on a big screen, the soundtrack is amazing when you hear it loud. It's powerful, it's a lot of rock and roll.
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To me that was half the fun because I'm more into music than I am and to film to be honest with you.
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I've seen some of his films in the big screen with audiences and some people laugh at them. It's a joke. Edwood is a joke. I don't think he is or was a joke.
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They made him a star that may be kind of in the wrong way, but Kathy always said that he would have loved the attention. He would absolutely have loved that, but she also didn't get it.
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On a similar level with the room in Tommy Wiseau when he first came out with the room and the fandom that arose from it in Vox, they put out a video all about the room and talking about bad movies, but why do we love them?
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And he brought up this really interesting question of like, if it is a bad movie, I should not want to watch it.
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And yet I watch the room at least like 35 times a year. So why is it that something that brings me so much joy is considered terrible?
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Why do you pause at a car crash when you're driving down the freeway and all the lucky lose, right? It's like, what drives you to that?
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You said, some more kind of a thing. It's like, I love car crashes. I'm not going to deny it. Yeah, you know, oh God, there's blood on the floor. Oh my God, is the worst movie ever made?
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I think what draws us to Ed, and I think we saw in the biopic as well as that he was someone that pushed forward no matter what he had this tenacity about him where he's like, I'm going to be a filmmaker no matter what the cost, no matter what it takes.
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This is what I'm going to do. And it reflected in his movies. It was like a piece of scene who he really was like even in a movie like Glen or Glenda, like one of the more autobiographical movies about him.
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And yet no one knew that this is who he really was. And yet he put it out for everyone to see in the most vulnerable time. And especially in a time where dressing in women's clothing was not something that was not the most important.
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It was something that was widely accepted. Still illegal at that point, too, in the early 50s here in California. It was legal in the 60s. And he writes about that a little bit in some of these short stories and articles that I collected during the 60s and early 70s.
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And he actually not be arrested, but he was way out in the 50s and would be surely go down to the bar or go to a meeting, add surely and stuff like that. But I think part of that was he was drunk.
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You know, see you get to a certain point where you just sound care in his Hollywood. You know what I mean? This is a town known for somebody having a pet panther and walking it down the boulevard, right?
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And I think that's why I celebrate the weirdos here. Exactly. And weirdos celebrate each other. So it misdivised me. But I'm so glad that I kind of became a part of this whole world because it's made my life more interesting.
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I know in years what I thought that I'd be one of the errors to Edward's estate, whatever that means. I tell people half and nothing is nothing planned for and a half from outer space. That would be me.
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That's what makes it really frustrating for me is because there's so much of his work that I think deserves to be put out there. And you see people putting it out, but illegally, I don't think they know that there's an estate of Edward.
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You know, most people just assume there's not. And so we rarely, if ever, even get alerted to the fact that somebody has done a reprint of Black Lives drag in Spain or people are doing bootleg books, I bought a copy of Side Show Siren on Amazon for $30 plus dollars just to see if I could track down who the publisher was.
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But I could print on demand book. I can't stop it because I can't claim that I own the copyright to that book. I can just put my review up and say, by the way, this is a bootleg pirated book and the estate of Edward does not condone this nor do we make any money off of it.
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I mean, I'm one of the people that benefited from a bootleg for sure, but like it was the only way I could get it.
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Yeah, yeah, I know I totally get that and I totally understand that there is a demand for his stuff to be out there. And I'm trying to do what little bit I can with these short stories and these other things.
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Chris for a possible off when I talk to him, he even brought to the subject of maybe getting the money together to buy the film back and then releasing it.
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That's a possibility too. I have no idea. I really know. Sometimes when the pandemic is over, I'll invite you over and I'll show you because yours probably has all the script in German, right?
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Yes, it does. The first time I saw that I went, what the is this? This is wrong? Because it's all in English. It's, you know, it's typed in English. People need to see the English version of it just because.
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It's a star-studded cast. Absolutely. That's the thing that surprised me was like how many well-known people are in here. This is Billy Zane around the time that he was doing Titanic.
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No, I know. It was the first movie that he did after Titanic.
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I'm glad I got that timeline right because I was trying to figure out like when in his career he was doing it because he looks pretty much the same age as he was in Titanic.
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And he's wearing a wig. If you saw the photos, it kind of has a shape. That obviously has a bad wig that he wears in the film. A good bad wig.
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And if this movie gets released, like I think people will look at him and be like this is probably peak Billy Zane.
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Anybody home? Come on, everybody. Time to play.
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Hello. Of all the performances and I remember watching this movie the first time even when it was sped up and I was like this is insane.
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I watched the clip of him robbing the lone center. And I was like I love this. I love what he's doing and the energy that he brings to it.
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The lone center building actually is on the corner of Hollywood and Coalanga and I used to walk by it all the time.
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And across the street was the small theater called theater theater where in the Edward film they shot casual company. They showed the exterior shot a casual company.
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Now just watching the clip the other night when the thief enters the bank loan building. There's a car parked on the street beyond that is the theater theater building, which is no longer there.
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It became a Greyhound bus depot. Now it's just a parking lot. For me it was kind of fun to know that both of those films had that one little and it's like two blocks from where Kathy and I lived.
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Oh wow. So it's just right down the street.
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I think that's everything that I needed to mind is there anything else that we may have missed.
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You guys mentioned something about Ed watching silent films, which is why this is a silent film. I don't think that's honest to be.
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I mean Ed worked in a movie theater but that was in the 30s, maybe 1940, whatever when he was a teenager at the barred of long theater there in Piquizzi.
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Yes, but Pyeongs was one of his favorite actors and obviously Bayla. I wonder and I'm sure you've wondered is like how would Ed have made this movie?
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How much sound would have been in the movie? Would music have been used when there have been a score? Would sound effects have been used?
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Or would they just grunt instead of talking? And if you get a chance to read the script that I sent you, you'll see how close a Reese followed the script.
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You'll read the script and you go, you did that shot just the way Ed wanted it to be shot.
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You know the only thing that was different was adding the sound and some of the found footage and then also the notes.
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Now I don't know if the typewriter notes were written into the script, in that aspect it was like a silent movie like with title cards.
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So that you'd know that the villain is you know taking Pauline away into the sawmill and gonna put her on the saw and blah blah blah.
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And it was the same way like well the thief does this and he does that and he does that and does that to move the exposition of the story along also is a space saver.
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So you don't have to spend all that extra money filming those other scenes and you are right in the assumption that once people heard that there was this unproduced Ed would film out there to be made.
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Everybody wanted to be in it. It's a wonderful film. I just hope it gets out there.
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This is a great film that more people need to see. Well thank you so much for your time for your stories. This has been incredible.
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Yeah. Adios, mi cha cha.
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[Music]
