He was fond enough of Corpse to mention it in his mid-1960s showbiz primer Hollywood Rat Race. In April 1946, on the precipice of his honorable discharge from the United States Marine Corps, Ed Wood told his hometown paper, The Poughkeepsie Journal, that he was in the process of turning one of his unfinished plays, The Inconvenient Corpse, into a novel. In a 1978 interview with Fred Olen Ray, Ed claimed to have sold a story called The Sunset Murders to the New York publishing company Street & Smith, known for dime novels and pulp fiction, when he was only 12. Movies were a long-time obsession for Ed Wood, and he stayed in the motion picture business as long as he could.īut Eddie seemingly had literary aspirations from an early age, too. The popular image of Ed is of the lifelong film fanatic who spent most of his childhood at the local cinema in Poughkeepsie, watching Westerns and Bela Lugosi pictures, and whose life was forever changed by the gift of a home movie camera from his father. Was it to be in theater? Movies? Television? Writing novels? He didn't know, so he tried all of those things without finding great success in any of them. I n the late 1940s, Ed Wood seemingly had no idea where his career was heading. (Mar.The Marines in Casual Company seem more interested in chasing babes than defending their country. While this brief book isn't quite bad enough to rank with Woods's most distinctive creations, dedicated fans will find it a howler. The irony of Wood's authorship of this manual (unpublished until this printing) during the 1960s, one of the bleaker times in his career, will be apparent to all readers-as will Wood's understandable bitterness as he spews out unending invective against the ''phonies'' who take advantage of young, angora sweater-wearing talent.

This somewhat entertaining glimpse of Hollywood's sleazy side won't disillusion those who think of Wood as an inept writer-his work is filled with mindless clich s (''You're only as good as your last picture!'')-and numerous, even obsessive, references to fluffy white angora sweaters (true to Tim Burton's recent portrayal). Wood offers tips on how to be discovered in Hollywood (you won't, stay at home) how to achieve stardom (become a character actor the likes of Jonathan Hale, Jane Darnell, Addison Richards and a seemingly endless list of other Hollywood nobodies of the 1950s) how to elude the casting couch (or at least, how to distinguish, and sleep with, legitimate producers rather than ''phonies'') and how to comport oneself in debtor's court.

Advice on achieving silver-screen immortality from an unlikely source, this kitschy and catty portrait of Tinseltown isn't likely to win any new fans for Wood, the writer, director and producer of what is generally agreed to be the worst movie ever made, Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Hollywood Rat Race by Ed Wood