Ed Wood
- For the biopic film, see Ed Wood (film)
- Edward Wood was also the name of Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, British Foreign Secretary
Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was a filmmaker known for a series of movies derided (or heralded, depending on one's fondness for kitsch) as "the worst of all time." He is undoubtedly the best-known maker of z-grade movies in the entire history of Hollywood, famed for his ultra-low budget horror, science fiction and cowboy motion pictures. After extensive critical and commercial failure, he ended his career making pornography and writing schlock transvestite-themed novels drawing from his own fetishes.
Wood's posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award for being the worst director of all time. Today, he is generally respected by film scholars and historians — not for his talent, which has so far not undergone any kind of critical re-appraisal, but for his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production. The very lack of conventional filmmaking ability in his work has earned him and his films a considerable cult following. Some of his films have been lampooned on the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which has given those works wider exposure.
Early years
Wood's father, Edward Sr., worked for the Postal Service and his family was shunted around America. Eventually they settled in Poughkeepsie, New York where Ed Wood Jr. was born.
In childhood, Wood was interested in the performing arts and pulp fiction. He collected comics, pulp magazines and adored movies, most notably Westerns and anything involving the occult. As a result of his obsession with film, he would often skip school in favor of watching pictures at the local movie theatre. Stills from that day's picture would often be thrown in the trash by theatre staff, but Wood would salvage them, making them additions to his extensive collection.
It is reported that Wood's mother, Lillian, always wanted a girl and sometimes dressed young Ed up in skirts and dresses. Some have presumed this to be the origin of Wood's non-sexually oriented transvestite tendencies.
One of his first paid jobs was as a cinema usher, although he also sang and played drums in a band. Later, he fronted a singing quartet called Eddie Wood's Little Splinters. He also learned to play a variety of string instruments. Ed was given his first movie camera on his 17th birthday: a Kodak 'City Special'. One of the first pieces of footage he shot was of the Hindenburg disaster, a piece he was endlessly proud of.
A patriotic boy, Wood enlisted in the Marines at age 17, just months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. He survived much combat and became a war hero. 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 the bizarre, Ed joined a carnival after being discharged from the Marine Corps. His several missing teeth and disfigured leg (souvenirs from his time in combat) combined with his personal fetishes and acting skills made him a perfect candidate for the freakshow. Ed played, among other roles, 'the geek' and the bearded lady. Still with rugged facial hair, he donned women's clothing and completed the illusion by creating his own prosthetic breasts. This was achieved (allegedly) by piercing the nipple and inflating the breast skin with air. This experience resulted in a respect for carnival freakshows and a reinforced adoration of the bizarre. Carnivals appear in Ed's novels and movies quite often, 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, Ed was a notorious womanizer in his younger days.
Movies
"If you want to know me, see 'Glen or Glenda'. That's me, that's my story, no question. But 'Plan 9' is my pride and joy. We used Cadillac hubcaps for flying saucers in that." - Ed Wood.
Wood's movies were notoriously low budget, and car hubcaps were indeed used as flying saucers in Plan 9 from Outer Space (actually, the first time one sees the saucers, they are model kit UFOs but the store from which they had been purchased had run out of kits by the time more had to be constructed so Wood improvised with the hubcaps only in the later shots). 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, so it looks as though the actor in the scene is wrestling with pure rubber.
One of Wood's heroes was Orson Welles, whom Wood admired because of his ambition and passion for making films. Wood also prided himself on the fact that he was the only film-maker other than Welles to be writer, director and usually an actor in most of his films, although it is likely that Wood took on all of these positions mostly to save time and money. Unlike his counterpart in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, though, 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 due to funding constraints. While most directors film only one scene per day (or just a fraction of one in more modern pictures), Wood would complete up to thirty. He seldom ordered a single re-take, even if the original was obviously flawed.
A number of has-been celebrities were involved in the most iconic films of Wood's career. Bela Lugosi had earned lasting fame for his performances in White Zombie and Dracula, but fell into obscurity and alcohol and drug addiction after Hollywood lost interest in his genre movies. Lugosi was given a second chance by Wood and starred in Wood's best and most famous pictures. Some suggest that Wood exploited Lugosi's fame, which was probably true to an extent, but most documents and interviews with other Wood alumni suggest that the two of them were good 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. His troupe of "Wood Spooks" would sometimes feature in his pictures completely illogically. Vampira's character in Plan 9 served no purpose to the plot and her vampire attire 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 transexuality, and Criswell's horror-film-cliche rising from a coffin during a thunderstorm is incongruous for a science fiction film.
Wood would go to radical extremes to drum up funding for his movies. Most notably, on Plan 9 from Outer Space he convinced members of the Southern Baptist church to invest the initial capital. There were always bilateral catches to these unorthodox funding methods though, and in this case the Baptists wanted a member of their own church to take a lead role in the film and demanded that every member of the cast (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 attributed to his lack of commercial success.
Angora, Wood's most fond fetish, was regularly featured in his films (most notably in Glen or Glenda). Kathy O'Hara and others recall that Ed's transvestitism was not a sexual inclination but rather that angora appealed to him because of the neo-maternal comfort it offered.
Wood pulp: Wood as author
While he is famed for his work as a film maker, Wood also penned innumerable novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. In his later years, he was unable to produce films on a regular basis due to his alcoholism, so he dedicated himself to writing. He would write screenplays for other directors (most famously, Bride and the Beast for Adrian Weiss) and his own novels for six years after his filmmaking career had drawn to a close.
Most of Wood's novels derived from his own transvestite fantasies as well as tapping into his love of crime and the occult. Wood’s careers of novelist and filmmaker would often intersect in that his books would often be novelisations of his own screenplays or that the stories from his novels would give way to the writing of a screenplay. Most notably, the character ‘Glen/Glenda’ from the movie Glen or Glenda would appear in two of his novels.
His stories typically careen off into different and unforeseen directions halfway through, as though no planning had taken place at all, and that Wood had sat down at the typewriter and simply made the story up as he went along. 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 Ed Wood is generally seen to be a naïve and friendly individual with high hopes but an easy-going attitude -- an image perhaps deriving from Johnny Depp's and Tim Burton's portrayal of him in the 1994 biopic -- some of his novels may be shocking to the average film/literature historian. 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 preyed on common racist fears. One might argue, however, that Wood was writing for a specific market and that the content of these books are not personal opinion.
Many of Ed's books did not make it into publication. Hollywood Rat Race, for example, was only released in 1998, perhaps as a result of modern interest in Ed Wood resulting from Tim Burton's 1994 biopic. The book is non-fiction: part primer for young actors and writers wanting to take on the motion picture industry and part memoir, revealing such stories as how he and Lugosi entered into the world of night club cabaret.
Last days
Wood had serious money troubles in his last days as he was often at the mercy of exploitative producers and independent directors. He would often produce full movie scripts for as little as one hundred dollars in order to make ends meet, and the entirety of his personal belongings could be packed into a single leather suitcase. His film career degenerated into directing (and occasionally appearing in) low grade pornographic films such as Necromania.
Wood's depression grew, and with it a serious drinking problem, notably an addiction to whisky. Many believe his depression was caused by the realization that he had failed in his quest for artistic recognition and stardom. Evicted from his Hollywood apartment, Wood and his wife moved into the bungalow of an actor friend. Only days after the move, Wood died of a heart attack, aged 54.
Posthumously, his extensive portfolio of terrible motion pictures earned him the Golden Turkey Award for being "the worst director of all time".
Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994)
Main article: Ed Wood (film).
The 1994 film Ed Wood, by director Tim Burton, tells the story of Wood and Bela Lugosi and the making of the three films they did together (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.
Cult Status
The prestigious University of Southern California annually holds the "Ed Wood Film Festival", in which students of all disciplines are challenged to form teams that 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).
Books
There have also been a number of titles written about Ed Wood including:
- Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey (ISBN 0922915245) - the primary source of biographical information for anyone interested in Ed Wood.
- Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. by David C. Hayes and Hayden Davis.
- This is Wood: an illustrated conversation between a Hollywood Historian and a Dead Director by Rob Westwood.
- Ed Wood: The Early Years by Jean Marie Stine.
See also
External links
- Ed Wood Jr. at IMDb
- The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr. Exhaustive guide to Ed's films and their commercial releases.
- The Church of Ed Wood "Church" devoted to the 'teachings' of Ed Wood.