Ed Wood (1994)

Ed Wood is Tim Burton's biopic based (loosely) on the life of cult auteur shit director Edward D. Wood Jr, a man known as much for writing, producing, directing, and starring in the first pro-transvestite film ever made, the unfortunately execrable Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and the all-time Turkey Award Winning (at least, according to the Medved Brothers and their book, The Golden Turkey Awards) outer space ghoul grave robbing flying saucer flick, Plan Nine from Outer Space (1957), starring a pitiful reel of stock footage of a tragic Bela Lugosi, who had already died. The source material for this movie, jazz guitarist Rudolph Grey's book, Nightmare of Ecstacy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Junior (Feral House, 1990) is, as John Waters notes, a "jaw-dropping" read. The movie is more of a send-up, satire, but has enough heartfelt schmaltz and good vibes to warm the heart of even the most jaded video viewer.

Ed Wood was a little boy from Poughkeepsie, New York born in 1924. He obsessively read the comics, pulp fiction magazines, and "Big Little Books" of the era, dreaming of Western shoot-'em-ups, adventure, romance, and his anti-hero, Bela Lugosi, whose classic portrayal in Dracula Ed must have seen around about the Good Year 1931. By the time he was called to serve his country, the imaginative little boy had developed a psyche or fantasy life that included the comfort of wearing women's undergarments under his uniform as he went into combat.

The Wood portrayed by a young Johnny Depp in THIS movie is a little hard to conceive as ever having been a soldier. As a matter of fact, he's really not all that much like Ed Wood: Depp is much smaller, with a smaller frame, and Wood's smooth, rolling murmur of a voice is characterized here as a happy-go-lucky, Jimminy Cricket squeal that oftentimes borders on caricature. I'm not sure where this particular character came from, or who he is supposed to be; he doesn't, in point of fact, seem authentically much like the late Ed Wood.

Be that as it may, he's an entertaining enough guy, endearing and able to capture attention from the get-go. The film opens with his abysmal failure of a stage play The Casual Company, being performed before almost no one in a theater with the roof dripping. The actors, Paul Marco and Conrad Brooks (Portrayed respectively by Max Casella and Brent Hinckley) are wooden, the dialog inane, and Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker ) makes a sudden appearance as an "angel" in a rope and harness affair that squeaks. Thus, this sets the tone for every other production Wood would get his unsavory mitts on.

His childhood hero, Lugosi (portrayed with uncanny excellency by the late Martin Landau), he meets in a particularly eerie scene, encountering Bela trying out a coffin at a funeral parlor, in "another bus-and-truck tour of Dracula. Twelve cities in ten days. If that's conceivable!" would eventually become his friend, his father-figure and fantasy character and perhaps meal-ticket to what he imagines is "the big time"; becomes his friend, dependent, responsibility--his shining almost supernatural "gift"; the deathless Dracula, whom he has always idolized.

The film follows Ed through the production of Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and his magnum opus of cinematic offal Plan Nine from Outer Space. Along the way, we have Bill Murray as the flamboyant transsexual "Bunny," (the commander in Plan Nine) George 'The Animal" Steele as wrestler turned bad movie actor Tor Johnson, the drop-dead gorgeous Juliet Landau as Loretta King, Lisa Marie as Vampira, and disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones as wildly inaccurate psychic Criswell. Thus comprising what one critic has called "a collection of Day of the Locust Weirdos," this ensemble cast is as engaging and attention-grabbing as Wood himself, who seems to be a denizen of two different worlds.

One world, his inner world, sees his celluloid atrocities as great and passionate works of art. Often, his weird visage can be seen mouthing lines of nonsensical and stupid dialog as it is repeated by a lame actor, quoting himself as if he is the poet of the ages. He seems genuinely befuddled by the outraged reception his films garner--and not just due to their technical ineptitude. Wood was the original sexual subversive, who liked to dress and felt comfortable donning the guise of a blonde-headed woman. And making an exploitation film of it (albeit, one mired in technical ineptitude, bad dialog, absurd plot twists, weird dream sequences so surrealistic they are almost reminiscent of certain scenes from Eraserhead), an exploitation film starring Bela Lugosi, another of Wood's "fantasies", (at the time, Lugosi was unhirable, and getting ready to perish of his drug addiction), one in which he sees only what he WANTS to see in Lugosi: the Great Actor, Dracula, the man who made his boyhood "nightmares of ecstasy"...come to life! (Or, perhaps, DEATH.)

By the time Lugosi is in treatment for drug addiction, Wood has met and fallen in love with Kathy (Patricia Arquette), who seems much too understanding about Ed's eccentricities. So passive, she seems almost a pushover. Ed gears up for the third film in his "Trilogy of Trash", the abominable Plan Nine, a film that looks as if it were shot for a high school film project. But Orson Welles himself (played incredibly by Vincent D'Onofrio) encourages Ed to go back and fight for his vision. "Ed, dreams are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dream come true?" Ed goes back into the studio, past the shocked Baptists who put up the money for the film (in hopes of financing religious pictures, eventually), and starts directing again in drag. The last scenes are a montage of his enraptured face, seeing every botched scene he directs as something out of Citizen Kane.

At the end, Ed and Kathy drive to the premier in a convertible with the ragtop stuck down, in a rainstorm. They go into the (unrealistically gala) premier, and Ed introduces the film as being "for Bela." Ed must have had a deep, passionate, caring for the bitter ol man, at least on some level.

As the abomination of a picture begins, we get a close-up of Ed's face. He mouths the dialog, as always, but then he says, "This is the one. This is the one I'll be remembered for." We feel his deep passion when he says this, his sense of history in the making. But we also know how wrong-headed he is, about just HOW they will remember him.

Ed and Kathy go off, still soaking in the rain, to Vegas, to get married. The movie ends on the Hollywood sign, from which Peg Entwistle, on 16 September 1932, jumped to her death. That sign has represented the crushed hopes and dashed dreams of many a fallen soul. Ed himself descended into a seedy world of directing "nudie cutie" films, porno loops, and writing hack erotic books for cash. He drank himself to death after being evicted. He spent those last, painful years, often relying on handouts from old friends, weeping over his bitter fate.

But the artist must suffer, yes?

And he obviously, as bad as he was, FELT his films, his WORK, deep within his soul. It drove him forward, even when the whole world pointed and laughed.

What is the value of admiring such a man? Should the artless and inexcusably inept be lauded simply because it was done with obvious passion by an even skewed visionary? Does a film such as Plan Nine have value for sentimental reasons? In a world where you can sell vomit on canvas for half a million dollars, do we dare say it ISN'T "art"?

Does such a film encourage a sloppy, slipshod, amateurish approach to young people just beginning as filmmakers? Or is there some deeper context that can be read into the trashcan oeuvre of Ed Wood, perhaps, the first, albeit unintentional, subversions of the existing social paradigm? Who else but that man would have had the sheer audacity to make a film such as Glen or Glenda...in 1953. Paving the way for a new approach to film, not to say a whole new view of sexuality and a place for human understanding. All of which may be a bit much for this charming send-up of a movie, this loving caricature of a man whose ecstacies and nightmares are still there, unbelievably, as bad as they often are, almost seventy years after he cobbled them together.

"This is the one," he says. "This is the ONE I'LL BE REMEMBERED FOR."

You better believe it.