George Weiss (producer)

George G. Weiss (born April 9, 1921) is an American film producer who specialized in independent 'road show' exploitation Z movies during the 1950s and sexploitation shockers in the 1960s that openly defied the motion picture production code of the day.

Weiss is best known as the producer who funded the exploitation film Glen or Glenda (1953) directed by Ed Wood, originally conceived as a fictionalized story of the sexual reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen. When Jorgensen refused to collaborate on the film, Wood wrote a new autobiographical script about his own struggle with being a closet transvestite and added stock film footage about sexual reassignment surgery. Weiss appears in the film in an uncredited cameo as "man at transvestite's suicide." Adding to the film's already extensive fantasy sequence, Weiss included incongruous scenes of scantily-clad women, bondage, and whipping taken from another project inspired by the fetish films of Irving Klaw. This was done partly to increase the film's length up to the required 70 minutes. (Source: Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., by Rudolph Grey, 1992: Feral House, Inc., pp. 46, 198)

In 1956 Weiss began filming a juvenile delinquent film under the working title Hellborn. The project was soon abandoned. The footage was sold and later incorporated into Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge and Night of the Ghouls.

Another connection between Weiss and Ed Wood is actor Timothy Farrell, the sympathetic doctor in Glen or Glenda. Farrell had a major role as a gangster in Wood's Jail Bait, and a supporting part in The Violent Years.

For Weiss, Farrell also played doctors in Hometown Girl (1949) and Test Tube Babies (1948), an exploitation film about artificial insemination. In 1951 he was in the risque burlesque film Paris After Midnight with famous stripper Tempest Storm.

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