Death of A Transvestite (1967)

Posted on April 25, 2010
Filed Under books, Ed Wood, exploitation

When I last saw young Glen Marker, he was both of the troubled title characters in Glen or Glenda (1952), Edward D. Wood Jr.’s fascinating and bizarre autobiographical film about cross-dressing. In those days, Glen was despised by his family, teetering on the brink of personal catastrophe, trying desperately to square the circle of his love for the beautiful Dolores and his obsession with angora. Now I’ve met Glen again, in the pages of Death of A Transvestite, Wood’s 1967 novel, and discovered that Glen finally abandoned the square world and went to work for the Syndicate as a transvestite hitman. That story is told in Killer in Drag, which I’ve not read. Death of a Transvestite completes the trilogy.

Death of a Transvestite opens in Glen’s cell in the death-house, three hours before his scheduled execution for murder. Read more

The Birth of A Nation is at it again

Posted on April 4, 2010
Filed Under contemporary, film news, silent films

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation is scheduled to go up at the Capitol Theatre in Rome, New York on April 17. The proposed exhibition has generated considerable controversy. Read more

Social notes, hideously deformed baby heads

Posted on April 3, 2010
Filed Under miscellany

One of the things I’m interested in exploring at Raymond Owen is the practical operation of social networks.

This is the Twitter account. This is Digg. Here’s Stumbleupon. Reddit. Mixx. These are all new accounts; the oldest, the Twitter account, was established about a month ago and has so far attracted 33 followers.

I enjoy Twitter and find it a convenient place to park links; most of the links presented in the last entry were first posted on Twitter. The other networks are new to me, and it will take some time to determine if I’m a good fit at any of them.

I’ve logged a couple of false starts on Facebook and have to rethink my approach.

The experiment starts from a near-null condition: Last week raymondowen.com hosted 36 visitors, who spent an average of 3 minutes 13 seconds on the site.

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Last night I attended the wildly successful opening of Wayne Propst’s “Baby Heads” show at The Frame Builder, where I was compelled to acquire the piece titled “Colonel Baby Head has been shot! Round up the usual suspects.” I’ll include a photo of the piece in an upcoming post. The show hangs throughout April. I urge you to search out the shoe box labeled “Poke the Baby” and… poke the baby.

Theo Epstein’s grandfather wrote Casablanca

Posted on April 1, 2010
Filed Under miscellany

Hat tip to @chrislazzarino, who passed along this truly fascinating nugget as we approach another baseball season. Theo Epstein, the celebrated general manager of the Boston Red Sox and reigning Sports Stats Whiz Kid, is the grandson and grand-nephew of two of the men who collected Academy Awards for the screenplay of Casablanca.

The Epstein brothers at WGA

Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, from the Writers Guild of America, West

Julius Epstein and Philip Epstein, twin brothers and top-line Hollywood writers, shared the screenwriting Oscar for Casablanca with Howard Koch; Theo Epstein is Philip Epstein’s grandson. (The screenplay owes a terrific debt to Everybody Comes to Rick’s, a then-unproduced play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison purchased by Warner Brothers for $20,000. Read more

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