EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.

an appreciation

The following text first appeared, in slightly different form, in the playbill of the EdFest 2000 festival which played at NADA Classic in NYC in September of 2000.

EDWARD D. WOOD, JR., (1925-1978)  first manned a camera as a boy, using his Christmas present, a clunky old super-8 home camera, to film the fatal flight of the doomed Hindenburg.  There are those more critical of Ed’s work than we who would consider that an appropriate omen.

                Ed has been, both during his life and after his death, mocked, vilified, reviled, parodied, and analysed to the point that the mention of his very name often sends more clueless people into fits of uncontrollable laughter.  But just how bad was Ed in relation to, say, Richard Fleischer, who started out with movies like “Compulsion” and ended up with dreck like “Million Dollar Mystery”, or hacks-for-hire like Joel Schumacher or Philip Noyce?  Is “Glen or Glenda” really any better or worse, technically speaking, than “Scorpio Rising” or “Meshes of the Afternoon”?  Why is it that a stupefyingly dull, witless movie like “Forbidden Planet”, through force of sheer nostalgia, gets crowned as a “sci-fi classic”, when “Plan Nine”, surely one of the most deliriously entertaining movies yet made, is considered “bad” simply because of its lack of adherence to the niceties of traditional linear narrative?

                Don’t misunderstand --  we’re fully aware of Ed’s almost total lack of talent or craft, his bewildering inability to notice his own technical and continuity foul-ups, and his sometimes hysterically inappropriate syntax and scene structure.  But it’s the passion, the iconoclasm, the sheer lunatic anti-genius of Ed Wood, that we are most concerned with this weekend.  Like any good “outsider” artist, one gets the impression that, given more time, money, and resources, Ed could have been one of the greats (let’s face it – if David Lynch hadn’t lucked into big budgets, would he have fared any better?). 

                So, what is it that makes Ed so fascinating, and so pitiable, long after his death? 

  WHAT MAKES ED ED?

                There’s the odd forced casualness – the inappropriate moments in which Ed, seemingly in an attempt to generate “sympathy” for his characters, allows them to act “charming” and “casual” at the most inappropriate moments – over the dead body of a dear friend, for example, or while discussing the suicide of a transvestite.  There are moments when it seems as though Ed is trying to play by the Hollywood rules, allowing his actors to seem movie-star handsome and suave – witness the permanently cocked hat of the army colonel in Plan Nine, or the hangdog melancholy of the poor put upon cops in Sinister Urge.  Ed seems less concerned with the reality of the situation than the mood of the moment.  This is not only jarring from a linear point of view – it often makes following his convoluted plots nearly impossible – but from an emotional point of view as well, allowing for a dreamlike state in which one is less interested in the plot mechanics than intrigued by the metaphorical aspects of them. 

                Then there is the complex and conflicted gender mechanics of Ed’s work – sorry to sound so much like an academic there, but, how else should we describe it?  Ed’s gender identification was a mess – his texts are rife with homoerotic and lesbianic subtext, and his male and female characters often switch traditional gender roles, sometimes within the course of a scene.  In nearly every Ed film (with the interesting exception of Plan Nine, which we’ll get to shortly), the women take an equal or greater role in the course of events than do the men – a highly daring and unusual occurrence in low-budget genre fiction, or any work of that time, really.  While “mainstream” pictures were relegating the women to the role of “girlfriend” or  “victim”, Ed was presenting strong, interesting women such as Loretta in Jail Bait, Janet in Bride of the Monster, and Gloria in Sinister Urge.  Sure, they weren’t perfect --- but then, Ed’s male characters never came off too well, either, often being inept, impotent, or just plain stupid. 

                Plan Nine is interesting in this regard in that he lays it right on the line – when the male characters rant about how foolish women are, especially when the space alien Eros attacks his female partner Tanna, it is shown in the most unflattering light possible:  Eros blathers about how the women are not fit to work in real jobs – “only to serve men and advance the race” – and it is this blinkered thinking that leads to his death, as, with Eros knocked unconscious, the female Tanna has no knowledge of how to fly or control their spacecraft.  Thus, Boom.

                This gender confusion was a personal issue for Ed.  As his many detractors love to point out with gleeful disdain, Ed was an unashamed and unabashed transvestite, madly fetishistic about women’s clothing, especially angora.  Interestingly, the movie which made this most apparent (other than Glen or Glenda, which was downright autobiographical), was “The Bride and The Beast”, which Ed wrote but did not direct, in which an overexcitable simian with an angora fetish falls for a busty lass with an almost exclusively angora wardrobe.  For a filmmaker of any level to so blatantly display his personal obsessions and fetishes on a regular basis was nothing short of absolute defiance.

                And, finally, there is Ed’s obvious and undying love for movie cliches and formulas, which is the tendency we have most aspired to here.  You name it, he loved it and tried to mimic it:  horror, sci-fi, noir, western, juvenile delinquents, women in prison, action, romance, melodrama.  Sometimes, Ed would cram two or three genres into one picture, as if terrified that he wouldn’t get another chance.  Ed, out of necessity as much as artistic bent, worked on full-fledged hardcore porn near the end of his tragic, brief life, and managed to get his personal obsessions and themes even into those sloppy messes.

  SO WHAT WOULD ED MAKE OF ALL THIS ?

                Many of Ed’s friends have mentioned his fondness for running prints of his old movies and rhapsodizing about the greatness of the work, the funny events which took place, the troubles, the last minute changes.  He would call friends at two or three in the morning to let them know that the local UHF station was running Violent Years or Plan Nine, and, dammit, they had to get up and watch it with him.  Ed, especially in his darkest days, lived for the movies, and was willing to accept any attention whatsoever, even when it was negative.  When Plan Nine received its first notice as an all-time camp classic, in an early 1960’s issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland (in an article by a young boy named Joe Dante!), Ed thought it the most amusing thing in the world.  Despite the snide tone and ungenerous nature of the mud slung by the Medved Brothers and others, one gets the feeling that Ed would have basked in the spotlight of being “The Worst Director of All Time”, even encouraged it, if only to get some more work done.  For that was Ed’s mantra – “Get it Done”.  Who cares if the cardboard gravestone shook when you fell against it?  Who cares if Tor flubbed his lines?  Who cares if the boom mike is visible?  We’re working here.  We’re making movies.  Money is being spent.  Audiences are waiting.  Get It Done.

                I think the determination, the love, and the passion that we have put into this festival would have done Ed proud.  We have tried, as much as possible, to take Ed and his work seriously when necessary and feasible (see Jail Bait and Fugitive Girls!), have spoofed him with great affection and no meanspiritedness when possible (see Sinister Urge! and Bride of the Monster), and, sometimes, managed to strike that spot in between (Violent Years!).  I think Ed would love the epic shows on tiny budgets, the long hours, the rabid determination, and, most of all, our insistence that, above all, these shows be entertaining, something which, sadly, most modern theater fails to really do.  Perhaps we are outcasts and outsiders ourselves, and, with our dilapidated theatre, cheap marquee, xeroxed posters, and threadbare costumes, we’ve attained some of the low-rent charm that the very best of Ed’s work possesses.  Perhaps we’re in the best possible position to really judge Ed and his work, and to pay tribute to it. 

--- Frank Cwiklik, September 2000

With genuine respect, admiration, and affection, the Masterworks Series is dedicated to the memory of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

"I look at this slush and try to remember... at one time, I made good movies..."  -- The Sinister Urge!