Ed Wood

Edward D. Wood Jr. must have been the Will Rogers of filmmaking: He never directed a shot he didn’t like. It takes a special eccentric person to be voted the Worst Director of All Time, a title that Wood has earned by applause. He was really passionately with every frame of every scene of every film he shot that he was blind to hilarious mistakes, awkward uselessness, and acting so bad that it earned a kind of majesty. However, badness alone would not have been enough to make him a legend. It was his love of film, sneaking through, that pushes him over the top.

Wood’s most famous films are “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (where Bela Lugosi died and was replaced by a double with a cloak pulled over his face), and “Glen or Glenda,” where Wood himself played the transvestite title roles. Roger Ebert said in his review, “It was widely known even at the time that Wood himself was an enthusiastic transvestite, and when Tim Burton, director of the "Batman" movies, announced a project named "Ed Wood," I assumed it would be some kind of a camp sendup, maybe a cross between "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Sunset Boulevard." I assumed wrong. What Burton has made is a film which celebrates Wood more than it mocks him, and which celebrates, too, the zany spirit of 1950s exploitation films - in which a great title, a has-been star and a lurid ad campaign were enough to get bookings for some of the oddest films ever made. It was a decade when there were still lots of drive-in movie theaters, cut-price fleapits and small-town bijous that thrived on grade Z double features.”

Ebert continued, “The people who made many of those films may have been hucksters and conmen, but they were not devoid of a sense of humor, and often their movies had more life and energy than their betters. America's theaters hadn't been centralized and computerized, and you couldn't book 2,000 screens with a single keystroke, and Ed Woods could thrive.”

Burton’s career has always shown a liking for touching outsiders, like “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman” and Jack Skellington (the lonely star of “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas”). In “Ed Wood,” released in 1994, he gives us a hero who is not simply an outsider, but one who attracts even more desperate cases to himself. Played by warmth and enthusiasm by Johnny Depp, Wood is a guy who simply must make movies – and who is do amazed by Hollywood legend that he mistakes poor Bela Lugosi, long past his prime and stuck in drug addiction, as a star.

There are others who fall into his trap: Bunny Breckinridge, played by Bill Murray, a camp master who would have stood out like a sore thumb in anyone else’s movies, but fit right into Wood’s. And the amazing Criswell, played by Jeffrey Jones, amazing mainly for being able to find employment for no apparent talent. And Tor, played by George “The Animal” Steele, physically clumsy but gifted according to Wood. And Vampira, played by Lisa Marie, the midnight movie hostess whose chest always looked moist. Finally, there is Lugosi, played brilliantly by Martin Landau, as a man who was partly Wood’s headliner, partly his patient. Ebert described, “When Wood assembled his casts, they looked like a cartoon portrait from Mad magazine.”

In Burton’s version, Wood is a man who not only accepts reality, but celebrates it. Far from being secretive about his love of dressing in women’s clothes, he treats it as the most natural thing in the world, putting on an angora sweater, skirt and high heels to help himself relax while directing a scene. “Are you a homosexual?” he’s asked. “No!” he replies cheerfully. “I’m a transvestite!” Depp plays Wood as a man wildly happy to be making movies. He rarely makes two takes of the same shot because the first one always looks great to him. (In one take Tor Johnson misses the door and walks into a wall, shaking the set, but when the cameraman in amazement asks Wood if he doesn’t want another shot, he replies thoughtfully, “You know, in actuality Lobo would have to struggle with that problem every day”).

Wood’s partner in his uncertain career is his long-suffering fiancée Dolores Fuller, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, whose misfortune is to view his situation clearly (“I see the usual gang of misfits and dope addicts are here”). She bravely tries to deal with is cross-dressing, however, and joins in to act along with the usual crew (Wood’s salaries were so low and infrequent that his actors bordered on volunteers).

Ebert said, “I am uncertain how much of the movie is based on actual fact, and how much has been invented by Burton and his writers, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. But I relished the process by which Wood's project "Grave Robbers from Outer Space" became "Plan 9 from Outer Space" after he raised the money from a church group which objected to grave-robbing, in the title, anyway.”

There is a wonderful scene were Wood grows livid when the church leaders try to mess with his vision, and breaks into Musso and Frank’s legendary grill room on Hollywood Boulevard, wearing women’s clothes and a wig. He spots Orson Welles, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, alone at a booth, turns to him for encouragement, and gets it – along with the movie’s funnies line of dialogue.

The movie’s black and white photography convincingly recaptures the look and feel of 1950s scandal, including some of the least convincing special effects in movie history. There are also running jokes involving Wood’s ability to write almost any piece of stock footage into almost any script.

At the center of the movie is Wood’s friendship with Lugosi, a man he really admired, and who comes to depend on him. We see Lugosi along and lonely in a weak little region house, surrounding the saddening despair of his obscurity and addiction (his first scene in the movie shows him trying on a coffin for size), and Wood is able to left the despair, if only briefly, in a final series of roles which gave him double immorality: As the star of some of the best horror movies ever made, and then of some of the worst.

This is a very good movie. Based on a director that I had never heard until I saw James Rolfe do a tribute to him, I thought this film was really well done. If you’re a Johnny Depp fan, you should definitely see this. Don’t skip this one over as I think this is one that you all can enjoy perfectly. Check it out and see the career of a director that people really thrashed throughout his career.

Next week I will look at a comedy that people really hated, but I didn’t when I saw it, in “Bill Murray Month.” Sorry for posting this late. I had a really tiring day at work.