Thrills to pay the bills: the erotic novels of Ed Wood
Long before the days of Tommy Wiseau, Ed Wood could theoretically have made a career out of directing hilariously bad movies. Which sounds absurd on the surface, right? After all, bad movies equal bad box office returns, surely?
Except that the movie industry is in constant flux. The industry we know today is very different from the one we knew two decades ago, and worlds apart from the one 20 years before that. The movie industry of the 1950s might as well be a different universe from the one we know today, and one that, so long as you could keep churning out cheap flicks for the right company with a minimum of fuss, you could keep up a solid career making sub-par quality stuff.
This was the company that, by rights, Ed Wood should have found himself in. After all, he was the absolute king of bad movies. Bride of the Monster, Jail Bait, Night of the Ghouls and who could possibly forget Plan 9 From Outer Space, one of the most legendarily godawful masterpieces you could ever find. The kind of pictures that have single-handedly kept Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the pop culture consciousness for years. For that alone, Wood’s work deserves a special place in our hearts.
However, the tragedy of Ed Wood, as documented in Tim Burton’s classic 1994 biopic, was that he saw himself as an artist. He never could handle the budgets given to him, so his were the worst of all possible worlds. Bad movies that went over budget that no one went to see. By the 1960s, Wood’s unreliable nature, combined with his worsening alcoholism, had burned all of his bridges in his little corner of Hollywood. Thus, he had to turn to other work to see him through. The man had always written his own movies, so turning to writing to supplement his income was the rational response.
Whether you can call what came afterwards rational is a very good question.
How did Ed Wood turn to writing porn?
In the 1960s, when Wood was working out what to do next, he struck up a friendship with Bernie Bloom.
At the time, Bloom was the general manager of Golden State News, which sounds like a prestigious paper, but it was anything but. Golden State News was little more than a porn rag with ideas above its station, but it did publish stories. Lurid, hypersexualised stories, but the erstwhile director was in dire straits and wasn’t going to be choosy. What’s more, Bloom absolutely adored Wood’s writing.
Thus, Wood began to work for Bloom. The former director churned out short stories, paperback novels and even magazine copy as Bloom began to turn his magazine into a full-on porn empire. Wood’s bibliography is as extensive as it is sordid, with titles like Parisian Passions, Bloodiest Sex Crimes in History, The Sexecutives and The Diary of a Transvestite Hooker. One would hope that this would give his friend the steady income his efforts deserve, but in true Ed Wood fashion, he was his own worst enemy.
The alcoholism that had kneecapped his Hollywood career had only worsened. While the income he was getting from writing was nothing to be sniffed at ($1,000 a novel when he could churn one out every month isn’t bad going in the late 1960s), every cent he earned, he drank. It took him 15 years, but Wood eventually drank himself to death in 1978 at the age of 54, his final novel, TV Lust, coming the previous year.
Like everything about the counter-culture icon, recognition for his writing came after his passing. Today, you can find a collected version of his works under the name of one of his most celebrated stories, Blood Splatters Quickly, and see that, for what it’s worth, Bloom was right. Wood was an excellent writer and one who deserves to be remembered as such.
If you can get through all the blood and jizz, that is.