Ed Wood, Jr.
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- This article is about the director. For the biopic film, see Ed Wood (film).
- Edward Wood was also the name of E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, British Foreign Secretary.
Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978) was an American motion picture director, screenwriter, actor, and producer.
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. After extensive critical and commercial failure, Wood ended his career making pornography and writing pulp crime and horror novels.
Wood's posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst Director of All Time, by popular vote. 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 inconceivable honor for Wood himself.
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[edit] 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. 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 her son up in skirts and dresses until he was about 12 years old. For the rest of his life, Wood was a non-sexually oriented transvestite.
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 a plane crashing to the ground; a piece he was endlessly proud of.
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 the bizarre, Wood joined a carnival after being discharged from the Marines. 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 freak show. Wood played, among other roles, 'the geek' and the bearded lady; to perform the latter role, he donned women's clothing and completed the illusion by creating his own prosthetic breasts. Carnivals appear in Wood'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, he was a notorious womanizer in his younger days.
[edit] 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, although car hubcaps were not used as flying saucers in later shots of Plan 9 from Outer Space. They were really made from cheap model kits of flying saucers, but it made for such a good story even Wood told people that 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, so it looks as though the actor in the scene is wrestling with pure 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, whom Wood admired because of his ambition and passion for making films. 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 positions mostly 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 skimpy budgets. While most directors film only one scene per day (or just a fraction of one in more modern pictures), Wood would complete up to 30. 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. 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. is among those who feel Wood exploited Lugosi's stardom, taking advantage of the fading actor when he could not refuse any work.[1] 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. His troupe of "Wood Spooks" would sometimes feature in his pictures in completely illogical fashion. 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 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 blamed for 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 Wood's transvestitism was not a sexual inclination but rather that angora appealed to him because of the neo-maternal comfort it offered.
[edit] Wood pulp: Wood as author
Wood wrote innumerable pulp crime, horror, and sex novels and occasional non-fiction pieces. From the 1950s onward, Wood supplemented his directing and screenwriting income with rapidly written pulp fiction. As he became increasingly unable to find funding for 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, nearly always reference his own angora fetish, and tap into his love of crime fiction and the occult. Wood would often reuse the plots of his films for novels, write novelisations of his own screenplays, or recycle elements from novels for scripts.
His stories typically careen off into different and 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 TV, 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 in 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.
[edit] Last days
Wood 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 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 followed. His jovial exuberance still shows through 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 little more than one continuous orgy broken by Wood taking happy hour breaks and then having to answer 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 the majority consists of lumbering, seemingly endless orgy sequences, Mrs. Stone's Thing 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's contribution to the film was appearing as a transvestite who spends his time at the party (the majority of the film) hanging out in a bedroom trying on lingerie. In Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, Robertson makes a reference to Wood making another appearance in a film called Misty; however, no other record remains of this film.
He would go on to appear in Fugitive Girls aka Five Loose Women and the 1977 slasher film Meatcleaver Massacre. His primary film work in the 1970s consisted of co-writing scripts for a string of softcore flicks with A.C. Stephens aka Steven Apostolof, as well as serving as "Assistant Director." These titles include The Class Reunion, The Snow Bunnies, The Beach Bunnies and The Cocktail Waitresses. One of these films, Drop-Out Wife, stands out as surprisingly substantial and poignant beyond its production values and the calibre of its peers.[citation needed]
Wood's depression worsened, and with it a serious drinking problem. His poison of choice was Imperial Whiskey, but he switched to Popov Vodka after Imperial went out of business. Evicted from his Hollywood apartment on Yucca Street, Wood and his wife moved into the bungalow of friend Peter Coe. Only days after the move, Wood died of a heart attack while watching a football game alone in Coe's basement. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, it was reported Wood yelled out "Kathy! Kathy, I'm dying!" a plea his wife upstairs ignored for 90 minutes before finally going downstairs to find him dead. (Wood apparently shouted this at his wife quite frequently, often to the point of Kathy yelling back "Shut up, Ed!")
Ed's wife Kathy died on June 26, 2006, having never remarried.
[edit] 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 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. 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 dud. 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.
[edit] Cult status
Among 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 the "Ed Wood Film Festival" annually, 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).
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) - 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.
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 Mike Nelson would go on to do an audio commentary for a 2005/2006 DVD release.
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.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr., dir. Brett Thompson, 1996
- Gray, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstacy
[edit] External links
- Ed Wood Jr. at the Internet Movie Database
- The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr. Exhaustive guide to Ed's films and their commercial releases.
- The Church of Ed Wood A legal religion based on the life and films of Edward D. Wood Jr.
- Ed Wood: America's Most Prolific Novelist?
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements | American film directors | American World War II veterans | B-movie directors | Deaths from cardiovascular disease | English-language film directors | Horror film directors | Mystery Science Theater 3000 | People from Dutchess County, New York | United States Marines | 1924 births | 1978 deaths
