Ever wonder what became of the Writer/Director of Teenagers From Outerspace? Yea, me too. Tom Graeff's story is not unique but fasinating for several reasons.LA CityBeat's Ron Garmon posts a good article on some of the background and a forthcoming bio from Doc filmmaker Jim Tushinski

Tom Graeff was a charming fellow. He was handsome and chiseled, a would-be sci-fi auteur whose biggest contribution to filmdom was, according to one trusted critic “silly, ponderous, and trite.” He was called the gay Ed Wood, but that misses the point of a real, if misapplied, talent. Also, he was sadder.

Openly gay long before Stonewall, preaching bisexuality on the radio as a panacea for our sexual ills, he tried to legally change his name to Jesus Christ II. Quakers had him committed. (via greencine)

POST SCRIPT: After we ran the above post, we recieved the following email from Elle Schneider-eds.             

Hi there! My name is Elle Schneider. I was googling around and noticed you liked to Ron Garmon's City Beat piece that came out a few weeks ago about filmmaker Tom Graeff. For some reason Ron was duped into thinking Mr. Tushinski was the only Graeff researcher around, though in reality he's one of three, the first of whom, Richard Valley, passed away last year. He was responsible for unearthing and publishing MANY of the facts Mr. Tushinski claimed were his own. I'm the other in this trifecta, and I run tomgraeff.org, a site dedicated to Graeff's life and work. I was wondering if you might amend your blog article to add a link to our site or our email address, as we're also interested in any information about Graeff that might better tell the world about his story. We're actually working on a documentary about Tom and his film Teenagers from Outer Space at the moment, with help from folks like Roger Corman and friends of Tom.

TFOS itself is a pretty interesting story, and I just thought that info would be of interest to you guys in case you ever mention Tom again. You can learn more about his life (and Teenagers from Outer Space) at www.tomgraeff.org.