Since no scripts of the Casual Company play have yet emerged, and since newspaper accounts of the era don't describe the plot or characters in detail, it's difficult to say how closely the novel follows the theatrical version of this material. How mild are the pranks? Their idea of a laugh riot is removing the aces from a deck of cards while one guy is out of the room, preventing him from winning at solitaire. The action - or, more accurately, inaction - of the book revolves around the five men who work in this stuffy office as they banter, argue, and play mild pranks on one another. In military terminology, a 'casual company' is defined as a holding unit for Marines awaiting discharge from the Corps, special training, or deployment to a unit. The setting is the Casual Company office at the U.S. It's an episodic work detailing the day-to-day lives of Marines in the somewhat drowsy days following World War II. Seemingly based on a comedic play Ed wrote while he was still in the Marines, the novel was unpublished during his lifetime and was finally serialized in Cult Movies magazine in 19 in anticipation of Tim Burton's Ed Wood biopic.īest described as a novella, Casual Company turns out to be a slight, slim book in which virtually nothing of consequence happens. One early Wood manuscript that did somehow survive, however, is 1948's Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. Neither The Sunset Murders nor The Inconvenient Corpse has ever surfaced, and Eddie's prolific career as a published novelist didn't really begin until 1963's Killer in Drag (aka Black Lace Drag). 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. The Marines in Casual Company seem more interested in chasing babes than defending their country.

Hollywood Rat Race by Ed Wood