WEIRD LOVE.(The Talk of the Town)(Critical Essay)

The filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr., who died in 1978, didn't make many movies during the last decade of his life, owing to problems with money and booze, not to mention the problem of never having made movies that were any good in the previous decades. He got by, toward the end, by writing pulp--some hundred and thirty-five sex novels, such as "Bye Bye Broadie" and "Killer in Drag." Seven years before he died, though, he did shoot one last picture, a pornographic film called "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!" Wood wrote, produced, and directed it (in three days, dressed in a pink baby-doll outfit) under the name Don Miller. The budget was five thousand dollars. It was one of the first skin flicks to have what, technically, could be called a plot, and for Ed Wood fanatics--among whom are many Woodites, as adherents of the Church of the Heavenly Wood call themselves (no joke)--it was for years the ultimate buried treasure, the Woodite equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wood made two versions, one soft-core (the sex is simulated) and the other hard-core (the sex is real), both of which went missing after an extremely brief run at the Hudson Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street, in 1971. The soft-core version turned up at a yard sale in California in 1992 and eventually achieved limited distribution, thanks to the exertions of some West Coast cult-video collectors. But the longer, dirtier cut was the grail.

In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudolph Grey, the author of the Ed Wood biography "Nightmare of Ecstasy" (which became the basis for the Tim Burton film "Ed Wood"), found the triple-X "Necromania" in a warehouse in Los Angeles. He and a B-movie distributor named Alexander Kogan bought the negatives for "two and a half nickels," as Kogan put it. Their next task was to figure out what to do with them. A year ago, Kogan came across a profile in the Times of the blog impresario Nick Denton, who had just launched a pornography Web site called Fleshbot. Kogan e-mailed Denton and said that if Denton ever wanted to sell porn films on his site he should consider buying "Necromania." "I bought it as a joke," Kogan said last week, in an effort to make it clear that he was not, repeat not, a pornographer.

Denton, however, was interested in it as a business proposition, in his quest to become a pornographer, if a somewhat ironic one, and next week he is releasing it as Fleshbot Films' first title. And so, at long last, Woodites, if not the world, have an opportunity to see ...