Gonzales is known as the pioneer of street skateboarding. Vision Skateboards About Vision Skateboards Founded in 1976 by Mark Gonzales, Vision was one of the biggest names in the industry during the 1980s. All it’s remembered now though is as being the bridge between the horror and sci-fi stuff he made before it and the porn he made after.80s skateboard. He was proud enough of his work that he says “Orgy of the Dead” (a movie he wrote based on his own novel and which was released right before this book was written) might end up being remembered as a ‘classic of it’s kind’. Maybe his talk of how much he loves every part of writing was him steeling himself for this new stage in his career and maybe all his talk about sleazy producers and who hard it is to make it in Hollywood comes from bitterness about how he ended up. He was drinking more, his suffered from depression and was so poor he ended up having to make the soft core porn films he looked down on so much as well as writing pornographic novels. But this was at the point in Wood’s career when it was all going downhill for him. It would be a few years until the likes of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Easy Rider’ ended up revitalising Hollywood so when he wrote this the only thing that seemed to be working for Hollywood according to him were ‘nudie pictures’ which Wood looked down on. This was written at a time when the future of Hollywood was uncertain, business was going down, television was being seen as significant competition, and fads like 3D weren’t working. Asides from the fact that he’s a passionate filmmaker who’s now famous for being among the worst is knowing how he spent his final years. There’s a real element of sadness that hangs over the whole thing though. The apartment itself was tiny (according to Wood you could only enter the bathroom sideways) and cost loads but as long as nobody came inside he could have loads of Hollywood people over and it made him look good. He tells a story about how he once rented a house right across the street from the Warner Brothers lot just because of where it was and because it had a nice pool. He also talks about some of his friends and the people he admires and how much he loves doing stuff for them, writing movies just so they have a part or organising a public appearance of Bela Lugosi because so many people thought he was dead. Not long before writing this book he wrote a documentary for the military and ended up finding it really interesting. He says he loves all of it and writing of every kind too. He really genuinely loved movies and Hollywood, he even devotes a chapter to the fact that some people hate the industry but he doesn’t understand how they can (he thinks communists are involved though). Where the book really comes alive though is when he goes on a tangent or starts talking about his own life.

Hollywood Rat Race by Ed Wood