How’s this for a stretch: Johnny Depp is (unfortunately for him) in the news lately, which reminded me that he starred as filmmaker Ed Wood in the 1994 film of the same name. I unearthed this look at Mr. Wood from a media column I wrote a year before he entered the mainstream via Depp’s film.
If I could change anything, given the benefit of time and experience, it would be the blunt (and subjective) assessment of Wood’s work as simply “bad.” The final sentence of this story is far too cruel.
As I get older, I become more and more impressed with people who actually CREATE. While we might be amused by the output, there is no question that Ed Wood was — against all odds — a Creator.
Also, if I were to rewrite for modern times, the phrase “huge Texas-style helpings of weirdness” (a comment - with internal redundancy - on the enormity of the weirdness) would be updated to “huge Florida-style helpings of weirdness.” ‘Nuff said.
For those of you unafraid to leave the safety of the beaten path, I offer a glimpse of pure, unfiltered, unmentholated badness. Badness that not only merely occurs, but is maintained and sustained over the entire career of one man --- Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Ed Wood, Jr. is best known by most people as the producer, writer, and director of what is regularly referred to as “the worst movie of all time” --- 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (aka Grave Robbers from Outer Space) starring Bela Lugosi. While Plan 9 is not by any means the most wretched film you’ll ever watch, it’ll still make you want to place orange cones and flares around your TV, as if to say, “Look out, drive around – big accident here.”
The whole thing seems like it was written in a very messy room. Ineptitude rears its head in nearly every scene ---
Sample narration at the beginning of the movie -- “Greetings my friend...we are all interested in the future – for it is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives...and remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” What?
The film constantly jumps from night to day and back again (an Ed Wood trademark in most of his work). In the Ed Wood universe, a car with its headlights on, even against a bright midday sky, represents pitch-black night.
A commercial airline cockpit is represented by two guys sitting in front of a cardboard wall with a shower curtain nailed to it.
With the movements of every passing actor on the “cemetery” set, the carpet of “ground” and plywood “tombstones” slide and wiggle.
It’s as if Wood lacked that little voice inside that would normally say, “C’mon, Ed; hubcaps on a string just aren’t gonna cut it as flying saucers.” (Makes a great title, but it’s a trope that was not at all accurate. See photo at the end of this story.)
Watching the movie is strange enough, but a little research adds another sticky layer of weirdness to the experience ---
It’s widely known that Bela Lugosi (in his final role; Lugosi had been receiving regular meds for sciatic neuritis and became addicted to doctor-prescribed morphine and methadone) appears in only the three scenes Wood was able to shoot before Lugosi died. These scenes are repeated over and over, with no relationship to the sequences preceding or following them, to establish the entrance of Lugosi’s character. For example, you are treated to the same shot of a menacing Lugosi crossing a field (with traffic clearly visible in the lower right portion of the screen) at least three times. An obviously much taller double appears in the rest of the “Lugosi” scenes with his cape thrown over his face. What is lesser known, however, is that Lugosi actually died before filming on Plan 9 began --- the footage used in the film is simply generic material Wood shot nearly a year earlier.
Wood took investment money from the local Baptist church to finance Plan 9. Before filming could begin, a condition of the deal was that the entire cast and crew become Baptists. They all did so, including the giant former wrestler Tor Johnson, a fun-loving sort who faked drowning during his baptism.
The eerie and nearly waist-less Vampira agreed to do the movie on the condition that her character remain mute -- a bright move that allowed her to emerge from the film without having to emit embarrassing Wood-composed dialogue.
An odd biography of Wood constructed out of reminisces of those around him called Nightmare of Ecstasy (by Rudolph Grey [Feral House]) provides a look at what led to and came after Plan 9.
Believe me, this book — executed as an oral history as told by Wood’s friends and associates — serves up huge Texas-style helpings of weirdness.
It turns out that by the time Ed Wood died in 1978 at age 54, he’d written over 80 books and made close to 32 self-funded films. He was a decorated Marine who saw extensive action in World War II.
Also revealed; Wood claimed to have spent the war wearing women’s underwear under his fatigues.
Throughout his adult life, Ed Wood, Jr. was an unapoloagetic heterosexual crossdresser with a cashmere fetish. In fact, he wrote, directed and starred in his manifesto Glen or Glenda, the story of a transvestite’s coming out and its consequences to those around him.
“If you want to see me, see Glen or Glenda?,” he once said. “That’s me. That’s my story.”
Bela Lugosi (!) again appears, this time as a god-like narrator at the beginning of the film. (The fact is, Lugosi owed nearly 100% of his screen work during his difficult final years to Ed Wood. Along with Tor Johnson and the TV psychic Criswall, Lugosi was the common thread in many of Wood’s films. At Lugosi’s funeral, Wood served as a pallbearer).
Drinking steadily and needing income badly, Wood later descended into the world of paperback pornography (Devil Girls, Sexecutives, Sex Museum) and “exploitation flicks” (The Peeper, The Sinister Urge, Necromania).
The 1965 film Orgy of the Dead (“Ed Wood, Jr.s masterpiece of erotic horror --- filmed in gorgeous and shocking SEXICOLOR!”) is available on Amazon, and you can see the whole mess on YouTube. It is truly unbelievable to watch --- an old and tired cue card-reading Criswell, wearing Bela Lugosi’s cape, is some sort of Master of the Dead who makes long speeches and orders naked dead women to do interpretive dances before him.
And they do.
And they do.
And they do.
And they do.
Ten different themes, one at a time, all peppered with stilted reaction shots from the captive couple and their ghoulish captors. The film creeps along like a slug on the sidewalk. Don’t attempt to view this movie without a finger on the fast-forward button.
There will be no Edward D. Wood, Jr. archives or library; Wood lost everything when he was tossed out of his last squalid apartment. He died a drunken and homeless former Marine who never got a break, nor necessarily deserved one. His films are amazing to watch because they reveal the single-minded vision of a man who refused to give up his struggle to create, even in the face of his own complete lack of talent.
In the end, after all his travails and efforts, he’d merely earned the right to have “Writer-Producer” listed on his death certificate under “Primary occupation of the deceased.”
Unlike a lot of his contemporaries like Dennis Steckler or Ted Mikels, Wood held a much different place in cinema history because he was trying to express a point of view, whereas the other schlockmeisters just wanted a quick cash grab from making the cheapest and most exploitative films possible. Wood had a true love for the medium, and much of his output is sort of a love letter to the films he grew up with. I'm convinced that it's Glen or Glenda that is his masterpiece, not Plan Nine. It's one of the most personal autobiographical expressions ever committed to celluloid.
John. These mini features, excuse my labelling, are fantastic. The slices of life you write and recap, are intriguing to say very little of how entertaining! Thanks for sharing!