Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 232: Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future (2023)

Want a whole lotta Criswell in one book? 

Criswell was the Liberace of futurists. 

Liberace: The Criswell of music?

There are so many connections between these strange, mid-20th-century entertainers, even though one predicted the future (dubiously) and the other played the piano (flamboyantly). Criswell and Liberace—one bisexual, the other gay, both products of the Midwest—were popular during roughly the same time period, from the 1950s to the 1970s. They both went by catchy, one-word monikers. They both favored flashy tuxedos and fancifully-coiffed hair. They were both fixtures of the TV talk show circuit. They were both widely parodied and mocked but didn't seem to care as long as they kept making money. 

Above all, Lee and Cris related to their fans in very similar ways. In fact, I think there's significant overlap between the Liberace audience and the Criswell audience. I picture a lot of middle-aged and older ladies with impatient, irritated husbands.

"Honestly, Gladys, I don't get what you see in that fruitcake!"

Liberace is actually name-checked numerous times in Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell (2023), Edwin Lee Canfield's thorough biography of the famed Indiana-born prognosticator. But Canfield oversaw another Criswell book in 2023. Together with Charles Phillip Wireman, he compiled a generous volume called Criswell Predicts an Accurate Glimpse of the Future. I see Accurate Glimpse as a companion or supplementary volume to Forbidden Predictions. When you read about Cris' life, you'll likely want to explore the man's work in further detail. Accurate Glimpse draws material from Criswell's many books, audio recordings, magazine articles, and newspaper columns. The editors pop in from time to time to offer some historical context.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Teaches of Beaches"

Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler in Beaches.

Remember the so-called "monoculture"? If you grew up in the 1980s or earlier, you certainly do. Back then, due to the constraints of technology and commerce, we mostly consumed the same media at the same time as everyone else. Whatever the "big" movies and TV shows were, that's what we watched. Whatever was in the Top 40, that's what we listened to. This may not sound like an ideal system, but it gave us a common frame of reference. When we talked about "the media" in the abstract, we were referring to the same material. Cable and home video started to erode the monoculture just a bit in the '80s, but the '90s was when the entertainment world truly started splintering into a lot of little hyper-specific facets.

Nowadays, thanks to the internet and the rise of personal devices like smartphones and tablets (meant to be used by an individual rather than a group), the entertainment we consume is well-tailored to our various demographic groups and delivered to us by algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. We stay in our lanes, culturally speaking, and it's considered "weird" (read; undesirable) to do otherwise. In 2025, it's very possible to have a supposed "hit" song that most of the country has never heard or a "hit" TV show that most of the country isn't even aware of. If it's not intended for you, it generally doesn't reach you. I suppose the last vestiges of the monoculture are the big franchise films that dominate the box office: the sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of familiar intellectual properties.

Director Garry Marshall's fifth film, Beaches (1988)—a tearjerking melodrama starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as lifelong friends with clashing personalities—is a definite product of the monoculture. Produced by Walt Disney's Touchstone Pictures division, it's a film designed to appeal to the widest-possible audience. And it did just that! Not only was the film a hit in theaters and on video, it launched a massive hit single ("Wind Beneath My Wings") and led to one of its cast members (Mayim Bialik) getting her own prime time sitcom. I don't think any of this would be remotely possible in 2025. Today, a film like Beaches, if it got made at all, would be shuffled off to a streaming service and quickly forgotten. Indeed, a 2017 remake of the film went straight to cable and was largely ignored.

So Beaches is a reminder of who we once were and of what pop culture used to be. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? We'll try to figure all that out as we review it in the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 231: Catching up with some recent reader feedback

What can I say? I love a cheap pun.

I have some very knowledgeable and attentive readers. This is mostly a good thing, but it can be a little worrying sometimes. Niche fandoms tend to attract people who are passionate and detail-oriented when it comes to their chosen subject matter, so I know that some complaints and corrections are (potentially) headed my way whenever I post a new article in this series. For the most part, however, Ed Wood's dedicated fans have been extremely generous in sharing books, articles, scripts, videos, photographs, and more with me. I'm truly grateful for that. Many articles in this series have come about because of the items people have sent me or because of the information they've shared with me.

Generally, the day I post a new Ed Wood Wednesdays article, I'll mention it on my various social media accounts, including the very active Ed Wood Jr. Facebook forum moderated by Bob Blackburn. These Facebook posts often inspire some interesting and informative responses. But social media is, by its very nature, ephemeral, so I wanted to document some of these responses before they evaporate forever from my memory.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 230: The Mortician's Tale (1966-1968)

Something about this particular story must have really captured Ed Wood's imagination.

Early in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a psychotic hitchhiker (Ed Neal) explains to a vanload of horrified hippies how the delicacy known as "head cheese" is made:

They take the head [of the cow] and they boil it, except for the tongue, and they scrape all the flesh away from the bone. They use everything. They don't throw nothing away. They use the jowls and the muscles and the eyes and the ligaments and everything! From the nose and the gums and all the flesh, and they boil it down into a big jelly of fats!

Ed Neal as the hitchhiker.

Ed Wood could definitely relate to this. Both his films and his writings have that distinct "head cheese" quality to them. If Eddie could help it, he didn't throw anything away either. He'd shamelessly recycle dialogue, plots, character names, and whatever he had on hand. He was so frugal that he edited footage from three separate, failed projects into his film Night of the Ghouls (1959) even though most of it clearly didn't belong there. And he'd occasionally publish short stories that were thin rewrites of stories he'd published only months before! In summary, he just took all the material he had available to him, the jowls and ligaments, and boiled it down into a big jelly of fats. Waste not, want not.

There is one particular plot that turns up at least three times in Ed Wood's literary canon, and it's a perfect metaphor for how Eddie worked. It tells of a disreputable mortician who bilks grieving families out of their money and blatantly abuses the helpless corpses placed in his care, sometimes for profit, sometimes just for fun. To put it mildly, this guy is a real scumbag: a liar, a thief, a necrophile, and a desecrator of graves. Even though he is eventually found out and must face the consequences of his actions, his story still leaves us with a feeling of disgust. And Ed Wood kept returning to that story! I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in more places that I just haven't found yet! But why? What, exactly, was the appeal of this story?

Well, let's examine it. As far as I know, we first meet this dastardly scoundrel in Chapter Twelve of Orgy of the Dead (Greenleaf, 1966), Ed Wood's patchwork novelization of his film script from the previous year. As I explained in my review of that book, the mortician is just one of the deceased individuals being judged by the Emperor, a mysterious cloaked figure who rules over the underworld and who holds court in a spooky cemetery on a moonlit night. Most of the other "defendants" in the novel are imported from Wood's short stories, but our mortician friend is a new creation.

The Orgy novel.

In Orgy, the mortician is identified as Lyle Carriage, a "cocky," well-dressed man of 45. He's so arrogant, in fact, that the Emperor has to scold him for being too familiar. Lyle says that he was considered "worse than a killer" and that his story received (in a rare Woodian acknowledgement of Vietnam) "more newspaper space than the war." He started out as a physician but was unable to make much money in that profession. Then, fatefully, he inherited a funeral parlor from his uncle. The only other employee besides himself was an elderly embalmer. Fortunately, Lyle's medical training made the job a natural fit for him.

On his first day at the funeral parlor, Lyle was overwhelmed by the sight of a deceased young woman in her late teens. This may have been the first indication of the mortician's latent perversities. Typical of an Ed Wood character, he obsessed over the woman's appearance and outfit. He became especially fixated on a handkerchief he used to wipe some makeup off the woman's face.

After a few months, Lyle began to hatch a scheme. He bought a nearby cemetery, forced the embalmer into retirement, and hired a couple of local drunks (similar to the characters from "To Kill a Saturday Night") to be his gravediggers. He also started convincing families to hold closed-casket funerals for their loved ones. That way, he was free to exploit the corpses. He sold their hair, their blood, and even their internal organs. Eventually, he started removing the flesh from the bones. That way he had two more saleable commodities: skeletons and meat. He especially enjoyed mutilating the bodies of "young girls" and then wearing their clothes. All the while, coffins full of rocks were being buried five or six deep in his cemetery.

It was quite a profitable operation, but it couldn't last. One day, while Lyle was chopping up another young woman and wearing her clothes, one of the drunken gravediggers staggered into his office. The other gravedigger had just recently died, and his sentimental coworker wanted "one last look at his buddy." Upon making the horrible discovery, the surviving drunk notified the police. After posting bail, Lyle decided to abscond with some money he had hidden away in one of the coffins he had buried. That's when a bony hand reached up from beyond the grave and dragged Lyle down to hell. The Emperor sentences the mortician to a most cruel fate: he shall forevermore be forced to wear a "frilly pink dress" that is "tattered, decaying, [and] crawling with grave mold and worms." The phony funeral director runs screaming into the woods. Interestingly, Lyle has become a "little man" by the end of the chapter. He'd been tall at the beginning of it.

The mortician's gruesome story resembles not only Night of the Ghouls, in which conman Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) inadvertently provokes the wrath of the dead, but also the long-unproduced I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1997), which also revolves around some money hidden in a coffin, plus the short story "In the Stony Lonesome" (1972). Interestingly, when he's digging up the coffin, Lyle uses a lighted match to see what he's doing, just as Officer Kelton (Paul Marco) does while rooting around in Inspector Clay's grave in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

Podcast Tuesday: "Stockholm Syndrome: The Romantic Comedy!"

Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn in Overboard.

Boy, were we obsessed with money in the 1980s! It was all we ever thought about, apart from sex, drugs, leg warmers, video games, and the music of Adam Ant. 

Admittedly, we humans have been obsessed with money ever since it was invented about five-thousand years ago, but our fixation on the topic hit a new high during the Reagan-Bush years. Or a new low, depending on your point of view. Either way, the subject dominated popular culture across all media in the '80s. On the radio, we'd hear "Money for Nothing," "Big Time," "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)," and "Material Girl." On television, we'd tune into capitalist fantasies like Dallas, Dynasty, Diff'rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. These shows taught us that, with enough cash in your bank account, you could live as you please and make your most vulgar consumerist dreams come true. And we bought into it!

But the movies outdid them all! Year after year, Hollywood gave us silly, over-the-top comedies about the extremely wealthy, often showcasing how they reacted to being around the extremely unwealthy.  Just off the top of my head, I remember Arthur (1981), Annie (1982), Trading Places (1983), Brewster's Millions (1985), Ruthless People (1986), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Big Business (1988), Coming to America (1988), and more. This was a time when it seemed like the characters in film comedies always had maids and butlers.

Somewhere in all this mess was Garry Marshall's fourth feature film, Overboard (1987) starring Goldie Hawn as a spoiled rich woman who loses her memory and Kurt Russell as an earthy carpenter who takes advantage of that situation. Edward Herrmann, Katherine Helmond, and Roddy McDowell come along for the ride. Have you already guessed that this is the film we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast? Well, it is. You can hear what we thought of Overboard by clicking the play button below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 229: Ed/Woody

Is there a connection between these two very different directors?

Not long ago, on this very blog, I declared that Ed Wood and Woody Allen were opposites. Eddie held onto seemingly every bit of footage he ever developed in the hopes of using it someday, while Woody scrapped and reshot an entire feature film at a cost of millions of dollars just because he felt like it. Obviously, these men had very different approaches to the filmmaking process. Besides, Woody is an Oscar winner who for decades (until his late-in-life downfall and disgrace) was one of America's most-respected and praised directors. And Eddie? Well... you know. MST3K. Golden Turkey Awards. "Worst Director Ever." That stuff.

But maybe these two have more in common than I'd thought. For one thing, they were born in the same state (New York) just eleven years apart. They witnessed decades of the same history and experienced a lot of the same popular culture, too. So they were drawing on the same source material when they became filmmakers and writers. Maybe their views even aligned to some degree. I know, for example, that both men were stubborn haters of rock music and never warmed to it, sort of like how people of my parents' generation remained deeply resentful of rap music even after it had been around for decades. And when you read Allen's short story "Count Dracula," as collected in the book Getting Even (1971), you get the sense that he's inspired by Bela Lugosi's portrayal of the title character.

An early Woody Allen film.

Recently, while doing research for my podcast, These Days Are Ours, I had to revisit one of Woody Allen's early comedies, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972). I hadn't thought much about that movie in years, but it was directly referenced in a Garry Marshall comedy I was reviewing called Nothing in Common (1986) so I had to refresh my memory. Specifically, in Nothing in Common, Tom Hanks quotes a joke from Everything You Always... in the hopes of impressing Sela Ward. It doesn't work. (Or maybe it does, because she sleeps with him just a few scenes later.)

When I started looking into Everything You Always..., one of the first sources I consulted was the movie's Wikipedia entry. And there, I discovered this very intriguing passage in the film's synopsis:

Victor, a sex researcher, and Helen Lacey, a journalist, visit Dr. Bernardo, a researcher who formerly worked with Masters and Johnson but now has his own laboratory complete with a lab assistant named Igor. After they see a series of bizarre sexual experiments underway at the lab and realize that Bernardo is insane, they escape before Helen becomes the subject of another of his experiments. The segment culminates with a scene in which the countryside is terrorized by a giant runaway breast created by the researcher. The first part of this segment is a parody of Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955), and especially, The Unearthly (1957), which also stars John Carradine. 

There it was: a direct reference to Ed Wood himself in an article about a Woody Allen movie! Even when I'm not looking for Eddie, I find him! Obviously, I had to investigate further.