two-day shooting schedule, with an additional day allotted for pick¬up shots and the filming of the intro. There were even western musicals. SQUARE DANCE JUBILEE (49), featured Cowboy Copas, Herman The Hermit and Spade Cooley and his band. KENTUCKY JUBILEE (51) included Jerry Colonna, Les "Carrot Top" Anderson and the Y-Knot Twirlers.

These projects were close to Ormond's heart—and his start as a vaudeville performer. But when the Howco company approached him about stitching together a grade-Z horror movie from some unused footage, Ormond agreed. The result, MESA OF LOST WOMEN (53), was hated by its director, but it remains one of his most notorious creations. By this point in their career, the Ormonds had made numerous connections in Hollywood. Their home served as an informal hangout for a variety of stage and screen performers. Bela Lugosi was a neighbor and close friend, and Lyle Talbot and former silent-film child star Jackie Coogan frequently dropped by for marathon games of gin rummy. (Talbot even made the Ormonds a gift of a poker set, which June and Tim own to this day.) Another pal was western star Don "Red" Barry, who convinced Ron to give parts to Barry's girlfriend at the time, Betty (later Julie) Adams. Adams ("a good little actress") started her career in Ormond's Lippert westerns. In her PV (#5) interview, she remembered, "We did six movies in five weeks! I was 'the girl' in all of them, so I had three different outfits. I had a riding outfit, a stage coach 'dress up' outfit and a 'farm girl" outfit. We'd shoot all the farmhouse scenes for all six movies in once, then all the stagecoach scenes. I had a hard time remembering who I was. Am I the 'farm girl' of the 'cow girl'? It was very funny."

Ron wasn't shy about asking his friends to appear in his films, and his friends weren't shy about accepting the work. Therefore, when Ron received a heap of salvageable footage from Tarantula, an unfinished, and unfinishable, Howco picture, he called upon his rummy-night buddy Coogan to help make sense of it. New scenes were quickly devised with Coogan as a cackling mad scientist creating a race of spider women. Ron hoped this would be enough of a plot structure to support Howco's unwieldy morass of nonsensical footage, but the odds were definitely stacked against him. "June remembers dressing the 'spider girls' (including Dolores Fuller) in cheap but effective costumes," Tim notes. "She gave them long fingernails and thick black hair." The "hair" was actually a dyed-black mop, but Tim nonetheless recalls the overall look as "creepy." June herself devised the killer ad line: "Have you ever been kissed by a woman like this?"

As if the plotline and performances weren't wacko enough, the movie is capped by an infernal flamenco-guitar-and-harmonica score by Hoyt Curtin, who later composed music for THE JETSONS. The Ormonds remember little about the recording of the music; to the best of their recollection, it was recorded in Mexico with a single mariachi. It was so utterly inappropriate that Howco reused it for Edward D. Wood Jr.'s JAIL BAIT (54). Note: Ron Ormond and Ed Wood never worked together, although Ron suggested the title for JAIL BAIT. "(Wood) was more of a professional acquaintance," Tim remembers, somewhat coolly. Coogan and Nixon had also appeared in Ormonds OUTLAW WOMEN (PV#5),aCinecolor (!) western comedy. The Lippert release was produced by Howco.

Throughout the 1950s, the Ormonds made similar cut-and-paste features, which relied more on June's promotional savvy than any intrinsic merit. One of these was ATTACK OF THE FLYING SAUCERS, a short made to cash in on the '50s alien-invader craze. "Since June was interested in flying saucers and had quite a few contacts in the UFO field, she met (famed 1950s UFO proponents) Rheinholt Schmidt and Dan Frye," Tim says. "In conversations with the group, June found out that this film was made and that a mother ship was portrayed. At that time, to her knowledge, this hadn't been shown before. So when she saw it, she bought it from a Mr. Nosseck for $1,500 from Germany. Mr. Nosseck was acting as the film's agent and was soliciting it for a company in Germany."

The short was tacked onto a double bill with FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE and another Ormond paste-up gem, a head-scratching hodgepodge called THE ETERNAL QUESTION "This was another one of the those films that was originally bought cheap," June recalls. The footage centered on a famous "palmist" named Joseph Renault, who claimed he could read people's characters and futures through their palms. "Ron had met Joseph Renault through Forrest Ackerman," Tim says, "but he knew (the footage) needed work to have any chance of success." Thus Ron and June wrote and produced a new beginning, a suicide scene that featured Ann Carvert, the wife of John Calvert, a former matinee idol and Ormond chum, and Charlie Chaplin, Jr. As a final audience grabber, June concocted a shrieking ad campaign that featured a huge hairy hand and threw in Hitler for good measure. The triple bill barreled through Southern drive-ins.

However, Ron Ormond took the greatest pride in projects he produced and controlled himself. Among these was UNTAMED MISTRESS (57), a tawdry jungle potboiler created in the same crazy-quilt fashion as MESA. Combining a short film he made for Howco with Sabu called BLACK PANTHER, actual jungle documentary footage, and new wraparound segments about a girl raised by gorillas, Ron shaped the many bizarre elements into one decidedly strange work.