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In the 1950s, Wood made a run of independently produced, extremely low-budget horror, science fiction and cowboy films, now celebrated for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts and outlandish plot elements. Wood is commonly regarded as one of the worst filmmakers of all time, although in fairness, his films did receive theatrical release and did attract customers, unlike some big-studio projects that were never completed or released. Wood's flair for showmanship gave his productions at least a modicum of commercial success.
Wood's posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time.[1] The lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned Wood and his films a considerable cult following. Following the publication of Rudolph Grey's biography Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's life and work have undergone minor public rehabilitation, with new light shed on his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production. Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood, earned an Academy Award -- an unattainable honor for Wood himself.
Early yearsWood's father, Edward Sr, worked for the Postal Service and his family was relocated numerous times around the United States. Eventually, they settled in Poughkeepsie, New York where Ed Wood, Jr. was born. During his childhood, Wood was interested in the performing arts and pulp fiction. He collected comics and pulp magazines, and adored movies, most notably Westerns and anything involving the occult. He would often skip school in favor of watching pictures at the local movie theater, at which stills from the day's movie would often be thrown in the trash by theatre staff, allowing Wood to salvage them to add to his extensive collection.
One of his first paid jobs was as a cinema usher, although he also sang and played drums in a band. He later fronted a singing quartet called Eddie Wood's Little Splinters, having learned to play a variety of string instruments. Wood was given his first movie camera on his 17th birthday: a Kodak "City Special." One of his first pieces of footage was a plane crashing to the ground, which imbued him with pride. Wood enlisted in the Marines at age 17, just months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. He claimed that he had participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal while secretly wearing a brassiere and panties beneath his uniform. Fascinated by the exotic and bizarre, Wood joined a carnival after discharge from the Marines. His several missing teeth and disfigured leg (souvenirs from his time in combat) combined with personal fetishes and acting skills made him a perfect candidate for the freak show. Wood played, among others, the geek and the bearded lady. As the bearded lady, he donned women's clothing and created his own prosthetic breasts. Carnivals would be frequently depicted in Wood's works, most notably (and semi-autobiographically) in the novel Killer in Drag. Wood's other vices included soft drugs, alcohol and sex. While he respected women and was completely faithful to his girlfriends (most notably Dolores Fuller) and wife Kathy O'Hara, he was a notorious womanizer in his younger days. MoviesImage:Glenda.jpg Edward D. Wood, Jr. clad in wig and angora sweater for Glen or Glenda. The flying saucers in Plan 9 from Outer Space were not actually made from car hubcaps, but from cheap model flying saucer kits purchased at a local toy store. But the "hubcap myth" was such a good story that Wood would continue to claim it in interviews. The octopus at the end of Bride of the Monster was supposed to have a motor to create the effect of a violent flailing beast, but the motor could not be located at the time, which is why it seems as if the actor in the scene is wrestling with mere rubber. Wood and his cohorts literally stole the octopus from Republic Studios in the dead of night, and accidentally tore off one of its legs before shooting. One of Wood's heroes was Orson Welles for his cinematic ambition and passion. Wood also prided himself on the fact that he was the only filmmaker other than Welles to be writer, director and actor in his own films, although it is likely that Wood took on all of these functions to save time and money. Unlike his counterpart in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, however, Wood never actually met his hero. His movies have a rushed quality to them, usually because Wood and his crew were working on a tight schedule with small budgets. While most directors film only one scene per day (or just a fraction of one in more contemporary pictures), Wood would complete up to 30. He seldom ordered a single retake, even if the original was obviously flawed. A number of has-been celebrities were involved in the most iconic films of Wood's career. Béla Lugosi had become a star for his performances in White Zombie and Dracula, but with the postwar decline of horror films he had fallen into obscurity, alcoholism and drug addiction. Lugosi appeared in Wood's most famous pictures, Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9. Bela Lugosi Jr. has been among those who felt Wood exploited Lugosi's stardom, taking advantage of the fading actor when he could not refuse any work.[2] Most documents and interviews with other Wood associates in Nightmare of Ecstasy suggest that Wood and Lugosi were genuine friends and that Wood helped Lugosi through the worst days of his depression and addiction. Other Wood alumni include B-movie regulars Kenne Duncan, Lyle Talbot, Conrad Brooks, Duke Moore and Timothy Farrell, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson; TV horror host Vampira; the eccentric gay socialite Bunny Breckinridge and the psychic Criswell. He would often cast these actors, regardless of the logic of their place in the film. Vampira's vampire attire in Plan 9 makes no sense in the context of the film. Similarly, Lugosi's horror-scientist character in Glen or Glenda is completely out of place for a quasi-documentary on transvetitism, and Criswell's horror-film-cliché rising from a coffin during a thunderstorm is incongruous to a science fiction film. Wood would go to radical extremes to fund his movies. Most notably, for Plan 9 from Outer Space, he convinced members of the Southern Baptist church to invest the initial capital. But there were always bilateral catches to these unorthodox funding methods: in this case, the Baptists required a member of their church to have a lead role in the film and demanded that all castmembers (including Vampira, Tor, 'Bunny' and Criswell) be baptised prior to filming. They also changed the name of the movie from Grave Robbers from Outer Space and removed lines from the script which they considered profane. Such editing from producers and financiers was one factor contributing to Wood's depression and was something he personally blamed for his lack of commercial success.[citation needed] Angora, Wood's fondest fetish, was regularly featured in his films (most notably in Glen or Glenda). Kathy O'Hara and others recall that Wood's transvestitism was not a sexual inclination but rather a neomaternal comfort derived mainly from angora fabric. ("Ann Gora" also happened to be one of Wood's pen names). Wood pulp: Wood as authorWood wrote innumerable pulp crime, horror, and sex novels (all paperback, never hardcover) and occasional non-fiction pieces. From the 1950s onward, Wood supplemented his directing and screenwriting income with hastily written pulp fiction. As he became increasingly unable to fund film projects, the novels seem to have become Wood's primary source of income. Wood's novels frequently include transvestite or drag queen characters, or entire plots centering around transvestitism (including his angora fetish), and tap into his love of crime fiction and the occult. Wood would often recycle plots of his films for novels, write novelisations of his own screenplays, or reuse elements from his novels in scripts. His stories typically digress in unforeseen directions halfway through, as if written with no planning or in stream of consciousness. Descriptions of Wood's working methods in Nightmare of Ecstasy indicate he would work on a dozen projects at once, simultaneously watching television, eating, drinking, and carrying on conversations while typing. In his quasi-memoir, Hollywood Rat Race, Wood advises new writers to "just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better." As Wood's most famous films of the 1950s are not explicitly sexual or violent, the outré content of his novels may shock the unprepared reader. Wood's dark side emerges in such sexual shockers as Raped in the Grass or The Perverts and in short stories such as "Toni: Black Tigress", which exploit hot-button topics like violence, race, juvenile delinquency, and drug culture. Some of Wood's books remained unpublished during his lifetime. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was released in 1998. The non-fiction book is part primer for young actors and filmmakers, and part memoir. In Rat Race, Wood recounts tales of dubious authenticity, such as how he and Lugosi entered the world of nightclub cabaret. Last daysWood had serious money troubles in his final years, as he was often at the mercy of exploitative producers and independent directors. He would often produce full movie scripts for as little as $100 in order to make ends meet, and the entirety of his personal belongings could be packed into a single leather suitcase. His career as a director degenerated into making pornographic films such as Necromania(1971) and Take It Out In Trade, a softcore take on the Philip Marlowe films. In addition to sporadic directing and grinding out low-grade film scripts (sometimes in a single night), Wood also made several less-than-dignified appearances as an actor. He appeared in two films produced by a Marine buddy, Joseph F. Robertson. Love Feast (1969), also known as Pretty Models All In A Row, was his first lead role in a film since Glen or Glenda, and would ultimately be his last. In contrast to his dapper, Hollywood-good-looks in Glen or Glenda, Wood opens the film visibly bloated by the 16 years of hard living that had ensued. But his jovial exuberance still shows in his role as a sleazy photographer who hires models with the sole intention of bedding them. By the end of the film, which is basically one continuous orgy interspersed with Wood taking happy hour breaks and answering the door, he appears to have aged even another decade. Sadder yet would be his next collaboration with Robertson, a smaller role in an ode to swinger parties, Mrs. Stone's Thing. Similar to Love Feast in that it mainly consists of tedious orgy sequences, the film makes ambitious attempts to expound on the dramatic elements of adultery and rape, an effort somewhat offset by farcical segments, such as an obese couple pushing two pool tables together to make love. Wood appeared as a transvestite who spends his time at the party (the majority of the film) trying on lingerie in a bedroom. In Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, Robertson makes a reference to Wood reappearing in a film called Misty, of which no other record remains. His last known on-screen appearance was in longtime cohort AC Stephen's Fugitive Girls aka Five Loose Women, where he played a dual cameo as Pops, the gas station attendant, and the sheriff, disguised with dark glasses and a mustache. His primary film work in the 1970s was cowriting scripts (and serving as "assistant director") for a string of softcore flicks with AC Stephen aka Steven Apostolof, including The Class Reunion, The Snow Bunnies, The Beach Bunnies and The Cocktail Waitresses. One of these films, Drop-Out Wife, stands out as surprisingly poignant beyond its production values and the calibre of its peers. Wood's depression worsened, and with it a serious drinking problem. His drink of choice was Imperial Whiskey, but he switched to Popov Vodka after the Ralph's supermarket on Highland went out of business. Evicted from his Hollywood apartment on Yucca Street, Wood and his wife moved into the North Hollywood apartment of friend Peter Coe. Only days after the move, Wood died of a heart attack while watching a football game alone in Coe's bedroom. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, it was reported Wood yelled out "Kathy, I can't breathe!", a plea his wife in the living room ignored for 90 minutes before finally going in to find him dead. (Wood apparently shouted this at his wife quite frequently, often to the point of Kathy yelling back "Shut up, Ed!") Wood's wife Kathy died on June 26, 2006, having never remarried. Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994)The 1994 film Ed Wood, by director Tim Burton, tells the story of Wood and Lugosi and the making of their three films, (Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space), from a sympathetic point of view. Wood was played by Johnny Depp and Lugosi by Martin Landau, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Burton's successes for Paramount Pictures were at odds with his insistence to shoot the Wood film in black-and-white, and the studio turned it down as a probable box office failure. Eager to embrace Burton, Disney Studios accepted the project, monochrome and all. As Paramount had anticipated, the film received mass critical acclaim but did poorly at the box office. It has since become a cult hit on video and DVD. Cult statusAmong connoisseurs of kitsch and bad cinema, Ed Wood is revered as the ultimate "bad" director of all time. His cult status began two years after his death with his recognition in the book The Golden Turkey Awards, and has continued with the rediscovery of many of his long-lost works. In an essay on Wood in Incredibly Strange Films, Jim Morton writes: "Eccentric and individualistic, Edward D Wood Jr was a man born to film. Lesser men, if forced to make movies under the conditions Wood faced, would have thrown up their hands in defeat." The University of Southern California holds an annual "Ed Wood Film Festival", in which students of all disciplines are challenged to form teams to write, film and edit an Ed Wood-inspired short film based on a preassigned theme. Past themes have included "Slippery When Wet" (2006), "What's That In Your Pocket?" (2005), and "Rebel Without A Bra" (2004). 2007 saw a break in this tradition when the theme "My eyes are killing me" was accompanied by a theme object: a mirror. Some of Wood's most famous films, including Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space have been remade as pornographic movies (as Glen & Glenda and Plan 69 From Outer Space, respectively). They were not simply spoofed or referenced, but reshot, with the same or similar script, and sex scenes worked into the original plots. In 1998, Wood's unfilmed script I Woke Up Early the Day I Died was produced, starring Billy Zane and Christina Ricci, and has preserved the inept, goofy character that made Wood's films famous. The film did not receive a theatrical release in the United States, and was only available on video in the nation of Germany due to contractual difficulties. Three of his films (Bride of the Monster, The Violent Years and The Sinister Urge) have been lampooned on the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which has given those works wider exposure. Producers considered including Plan 9, but found it had too much dialogue for the show's format. Series head writer and host Michael J. Nelson would go on to do an audio commentary for a 2005/2006 DVD release of the film, which was newly colorized. Reverend Steve Galindo of Sacramento, California created a legally recognized religion in 1996 with Wood as its official savior. The Church of Ed Wood [1] now boasts over 3,500 legally baptized followers. See alsoReferences
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