Ten Questions for Bob Blackburn about his new memoir titled “Kathy Wood and I - How I Fell Down the Angora Rabbit Hole”

Ten Questions for Bob Blackburn about his new memoir titled “Kathy Wood and I - How I Fell Down the Angora Rabbit Hole”

1. First of all, did you ever actually meet Ed Wood, Jr.?
No I didn't and I wish I would have, now that I've been down this road since realizing that his widow, Kathy, was my neighbor. Ed died on Sunday, Dec. 7th, 1978 and I didn't move to Hollywood until March of 1989.

2. Why did you move to Hollywood in the first place?
Well, I had helped a friends rock band relocate here in 1985 and felt at home, and in 1989, after attending radio broadcasting school, and working for a few stations in Seattle. Through one of my old Program Directors I found out about a “Board-Operator” job at KIIS-FM

3. What was Hollywood like in 1989 when you relocated here?
At the time it was a mix of tourists (it always has been), runaways, homeless, and the drug trade was controlled by the 18th Street Gang. So on many weekend nights you'd hear gunfire in the streets, cars dragging, and lots of party folks, plus the rock 'n rollers.

4. How did you first realize your neighbor was Ed Wood, Jr.s widow?
I attended an Ed-Wood-A-Thon at a local dive movie theater that in the summer of 1992 was running weekend cult film programs. I saw a short documentary on Ed called “The Incredibly Strange Film Show” (which is on YouTube), and there was an interview with “Ed Wood's Widow-Kathy Wood”. She looked familiar, and her name 'K.Wood', was on the mailbox for her apartment.

5. You were a neighbor, but how did your friendship evolve?
Later in 1992, I found out through a friend that Tim Burton was in the early stages of making a film about Ed, titled “ED WOOD” (1994), I asked Mrs. Wood if she was aware of it, she wasn't. I helped her find an entertainment lawyer and because of that we developed a friendship.

6. One of your appendixes in the book is a list of the movies you recalled you and Mrs. Wood attended together, do any stand out that she particularly enjoyed?
Well, her favorite actor was Kevin Spacey, but the one she really laughed out loud at and seriously thought the screenwriters had ripped off the life of Ed, for their script, was “Bowfinger” (1999).

7. How did Ed and Kathy actually meet? Assuming it wasn't in the waiting room at a local sanitarium and Kathy knitting booties for her father (as depicted in “ED WOOD”)
Kathy and Ed actually had sat next to each other in the balcony of the Wiltern
Theater on three consecutive Sundays to listen to lectures on The Science of the
Mind around early 1956, Kathy thought the gentleman handing her the offering
plate was cute, but they never spoke, a few weeks later they met at a Hollywood
bar called The Cameo Room, and from then on together until Ed's death in 1978.

8. Ed Wood, Jr. had a tough time in Hollywood, yet he made some of the most
famous “cult” movies of all time, including “Plan 9 From Outer Space” how did Kathy feel about Ed's posthumous notoriety?
Initially I think she was a bit baffled by it, but she always used to say how much Eddie would have loved the attention, and that possible with his cult status could have continued making the kinds of movies he loved.

9. There's an inscription that you insisted be written on her crypt at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, what is it and why?
It is “SHE HITCHED HER WAGON TO A STAR”. Her father always told her when she was a young girl that she was going to “hitch her wagon to a star” and she repeated this to me a lot, and she said for better or worse that Eddie was her star.

10. Final thoughts?
There has been a lot of information researched and published about Ed Wood, Jr., some of it true and much of it not so true, Ed was a story teller all his life and he created a few of the myths that still surround his life. Kathy Wood, has been acknowledged, but just as an appendage to Ed even her mentions in Ed's wiki entry talk about Ed's last day and Kathy refusing to get him another drink, she was tired,fed up, they had just lost their apartment due to failure to pay 5 months rent. Ed had finally let her down, but after his passing she picked herself up and lived the rest of her life with dignity and quietly. I hope I do her a little justice with this book. Thank you.