Who was Ed Wood?
Short answer: Edward Davis Wood Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was that rare mix of relentless motivation and determination combined with a complete lack of natural talent. He was that guy who made Plan 9 from Outer Space and a bunch of other crappy movies. He also liked to wear dresses.
Long answer: Throughout his life, Ed Wood loved movies and wanted to make his own. In 1942, Wood enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, and he served in the Pacific War theater of World War II (eventually claiming to have fought at the Battle of Tarawa while wearing a bra and panties under his uniform; of this experience he once said that he wasn't afraid of being killed, but he was scared of being merely wounded - because he was afraid a medic would discover his secret). He reportedly survived the War with only a leg injury, and having lost two of his teeth to a rifle butt strike by a Japanese soldier.
Later, he would join a freak show as a bearded lady. In the late forties, Wood would begin his career in movies. One of his first works was a play called Casual Company, based on a novel that was based on his life at the Marines. To foreshadow what was to come, the play suffered from extremely negative reviews.
Ed Wood dabbled in television pilots, such as a soap Sun Was Setting (which amusingly had the alternative title of The Sun Also Sets) starring the Lois Lane from The Adventures of Superman herself, Phyllis Coates, and Crossroad Avenger, which featured many of his Production Posse; the Western circled around The Tuscon Kid, who was a good old cowboy and insurance claims investigator. He even made television ad pilots, which advertised non-existant products, presumably a demo reel to show off his skills. By all accounts, Wood was actually perfectly competent when it came to directing television — his exact number of television credits remains unclear, given that local television shows from that era were often broadcast live and not archived in any form — and could have made a decent career for himself in that media, but he felt that cinema was his true calling.
His first actual film would be in 1953, Glen or Glenda (based loosely on his novel Death Of A Transvestite), a semi-autobiographical tale about transsexuality and Ed Wood's love for crossdressing. During this time, he met and eventually became friends with Bela Lugosi. This was when the Dracula days were long gone and people thought he was dead, but this didn't stop Ed Wood from thinking of him as a legend among men. Bela would take a small part in Glen Or Glenda as a narrator now known for yelling "PULL THE STRING!!!" while clips of bison stampeding were shown.
Ed Wood later became part of the B-Movie scene, befriending people such as Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira (The '50s equivalent of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), and a psychic known as the Amazing Criswell. In 1955, he wrote and directed his first horror film Bride of the Monster. It starred Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist, a 400-pound wrestler named Tor Johnson as the hulking sidekick, and stock footage of an octopus.
Wood wrote a successful film, The Bride and the Beast, directed by Adrian Weiss, complete with a weird Twist Ending. With his uncanny financial sense, however, the money he earned didn't last long.
Wood began work on a film called The Ghoul Goes West, an intended expansion of his previous unfinished cowboy film Crossroads of Laredo - but now with Bela Lugosi and horror elements added in. Unfortunately, Lugosi died after filming a small scene. Wood improvised and used these clips for his next film, the now infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space. Produced by Southern Baptist ministers, the film would feature aliens using zombies to stop humans from destroying the Earth. Vampira, Tor Johnson, a bad Bela Lugosi stand-in, and Criswell also appeared. The film was finished in 1956, but was not released until 1959 due to lack of a proper distributor.
After filming Night of the Ghouls, which would not get released until 1984, Wood would turn to writing for exploitation films, such as The Violent Years and The Sinister Urge. The former was a long-running B-movie circuit hit, but Wood only earned $500 from it. Then in the early seventies, the last years of his life, he would end up writing for porn flicks, a career that did not agree with him: although Wood's previous films were bad, they were never sleazy. Wood's alcoholism spiraled out of control, and by the end, he and his wife Kathy were so poor that they were evicted out of their flophouse apartment. Three days later, Wood died of a heart attack at a friend's house while watching football. According to Rudolph Grey's book, Nightmare of Ecstasy, the medics carried Ed's body away in plastic garbage bags. He reportedly was in agony in his last moments: "I still remember when I went into that room that afternoon and he was dead, his eyes and mouth were wide open. I'll never forget the look in his eyes. He clutched at the sheets. It looked like he'd seen hell".
Two years later, Wood was named "Worst Director of All Time" and Plan 9 was named "Worst Movie Ever Made" in a book called The Golden Turkey Awards, written by the brothers Michael Medved and Harry Medved. By this point Ed Wood was long forgotten and most people who read the book had never heard of him. This "Award" created a resurgence of interest, resulting in a whole new audience of fans, and cult status for Ed Wood. He became the focus of an entire segment of It Came from Hollywood. Three of his films were riffed by MST3K. One of his scripts was made into a 1998 film, I Woke Up Early The Day I Died. Even a small religious group became named after Ed Wood.
In 1991, Wood's life became the subject of a biography titled Nightmare Of Ecstasy, written by Rudolph Grey. It would become the basis for the 1994 film Ed Wood by Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp as Ed Wood. Deviating from the general real-life consensus of Wood, Burton's film was an affectionate portrayal of a man who tried his hardest, against all odds, to make his dreams come true. The film did not perform well at the box office, but was praised by critics, and eventually became a Cult Classic. One good-natured reviewer described it as, "The story of the least successful director of all time, as told by one of the most successful directors of all time." At the 1994 Academy Awards, Martin Landau won Best Supporting Actor for his extraordinary performance as Bela Lugosi. Ed Wood's legacy as one of the worst directors will never be forgotten.
Filmography
Feature films both written and directed by Wood. He also wrote scripts for other directors.- Glen or Glenda (1953)
- Jail Bait (1954)
- Bride of the Monster (1955)
- Plan 9 from Outer Space (directed in 1956, released in 1958/1959)
- The Violent Years (1956)
- Night of the Ghouls (1959)
- The Sinister Urge (1961)
- Take It Out in Trade (1970)
- Excited (1970)
- The Only House (1971)
- Necromania (1971)
- The Young Marrieds (1971)
Ed Wood is known for these tropes:
- Author Appeal: Angora, Bela Lugosi, monsters, cowboys, etc.
- B-Movie: Often considered the Trope Maker for Z movies due to his extremely low production values and liberal use of Stock Footage and Off-the-Shelf FX.
- Creator's Apathy: Because of the small budgets and short deadlines his movies had, Wood simply didn't bother fixing any goofs or technical errors that occured while filming. Even when pressed on it he'd argue how audiences wouldn't pay attention to such details in a movie.
- Development Hell: Night of the Ghouls was shot in 1959 but didn't get a release til 1984, when a studio paid for the lab bill. Wood also toiled on a book, Hollywood Rat Race, in the early 60's, but didn't get a release til a publisher took the unfinished manuscript and released it in 1998.
- Everyone Has Standards: He considered Robot Monster one of the worst movies ever made.
- Executive Meddling: Happened quite a lot in his career.
- The random BDSM scene in Glen or Glenda was added behind Wood's back by producer George Weiss in order to extend the movie's run time to 65 minutes.
- After funding fell through during the filming of Bride of the Monster, Wood approached rancher Donald McCoy to help fund for its completion. Don agreed under the agreement that his son was given the lead role and that the movie ended with an atomic explosion.
- The decision to rename Plan 9 from Grave Robbers from Outer Space came from the producers who felt the original title was blasphemous (said producers were Southern Baptist ministers). Wood hated it at first but later admitted that it was a better name.
- Friendly Fandoms: Any bad filmmaker who's been compared to Wood is more than likely to share a fandom with him. Directors like Coleman Francis, Uwe Boll, James Nguyen, and Neil Breen are the most prominent examples that come to mind, but there's also those like Donald G. Jackson and his collaborator Scott Shaw, who were often described as "the Ed Woods of the video age" during the height of their careers in the 80s and 90s (Hell Comes to Frogtown, Pocket Ninjas). To a lesser extent, Albert Pyun has also been compared to Wood a few times, but even then most critics would argue that he (at best) showed a bit more competence in quality than Wood ever did; especially since a few of his films like Cyborg were actually successful at the box office.
- Genre Throwback: Many people think of his filmography as being essentially very similar to other cheap 1950s B-movies aside from being really poorly-made; in reality, his films were intended to be the antithesis of those types of films, and were created as throwbacks to classic science fiction and horror movies from the 1930s. This is even discussed in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, in a scene where Wood and Bela Lugosi bemoan how, in their opinion, horror movies in The '50s had degenerated into "giant insect" films. That said, Wood's best-known movies - Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster - both try to marry the '30s Universal Horror vibe he loved to more contemporary '50s themes, like aliens and the nuclear threat.
- Later-Installment Weirdness: While his films from his most well-known period are known for being of shoddy quality, his later films after Plan 9 were just plain exploitive in nature and by the end of his life was directing porn in order to pay his bills.
- No Budget: Basically his entire filmography was this, and boy did it show. The estimated budgets for each of his 1950s feature films ranged from $20,000 (the lowest one) to $70,000 (the highest one). Glen or Glenda was commissioned by film producer George Weiss, but most of the other films had to be financed by Wood himself and whatever investors he could attract.
- Promoted Fanboy: Wood was a huge fan of 1930s Westerns and classic MGM monster movies. Most of his projects reflect that love, hiring has-been actors from those genres, most famously making Dracula himself Bela Lugosi one of his most well-known collaborators.
- Public Domain: Nearly every film he's directed had its copyright expire, which greatly helped his cult status develop amongst curious viewers wanting to see how awful they really are.
- Reality Subtext:
- The anti-porn message and the director reflecting on his film career in The Sinister Urge reflect Wood's own career at the time of filming. He held disdain for the developing porn industry during the 60's but was forced to shift towards this direction in order to keep finding work. At the time of his death, Wood was an alcoholic and suffered from depression over what his career had become.
- The reason for the aliens reanimating the dead in Plan 9, to stop mankind from creating a superweapon capable of destroying the entire universe, is an obvious reference to the ongoing Cold War and the threat of a nuclear apocalypse brought on by the U.S. and Soviet Union.
- Wood's transvestism and the fear he had of coming forward to his girlfriend about it influenced Glen or Glenda's conflict enough for Wood to cast them both in the main leads. Unlike the film, though, his girlfriend wasn't as accepting of it and broke up with him sometime afterwards.note
- Stock Footage: He frequently used it in his films; far too often it tended not to match the footage he filmed himself.
