The Valley Obscured by Smog (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798905350023)

He came for Hollywood. He found Ed Wood.

Summer, 1977. Fresh out of college, Alan Starkwell arrives in Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. Within a week he's writing dirty stories for a smut magazine in a windowless office.

Working across the hall: Ed Wood.

Once Hollywood's most ambitious, if not most talented, filmmaker, Wood is now broke, drunk and forgotten. Like his favorite angora sweater, he's falling apart at the seams. But when a small-time pornographer offers him one last chance to make a movie, he pulls Alan along with him into a world of faded celebrities, borrowed coffins and... wolf mummies?

Along the way Alan dines and dashes with John Holmes, talks shop with Charles Bukowski, crashes Keith Moon's beach party and falls for the lead singer of The Castration Squad. None of it goes particularly well. But it'll make a great screenplay!

"Apel's sensitive and honest depiction of Ed Wood's persona . . . portrays Ed and Kathy Wood just as I knew them. I often found myself watching a film in my mind's eye while reading it. I was truly moved by this paean to Wood, a filmmaker who relentlessly chased his dream."

- Robert Cremer, author of Béla Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape, who interviewed Ed Wood in the 1970s