I have posted this in several other places on the database but I want more feedback so I am posting it here as well:
I know my viewpoint on Ed Wood films may be unconventional, but I want to post some of my thoughts on his films, and then I will probably start another thread to discuss his impact on Hollywood history, which I believe is greater than is generally believed.
OK, first of all, I am not one of those who thinks Ed Wood is a "bad" director..... certainly not the "worst director" in the history of film. For one thing, his films have a distinctive style. Some of this is from his visual style, some of it is from the actors he employed, and some is from his bizarre dialogue. I will go into all of these areas as briefly as I can. But generally, what I'm saying is that no director who has a distinctive style can be the "worst". The worst director would be one who makes very impersonal films that cannot be distinguished from anyone else's movies. I believe that Ed Wood was fairly unique among the B moviemakers of the early 50s in that he seemed to CARE about the films he was making, the actors he was working with, and even the genre he was working in. Most directors who worked in the Western and Science Fiction/horror genres as Wood did at that time do not have any love for those genres (for example, Nathan Juran, Chuck Beaumont, Edward Kahn, they were all basically workmen who had no personal attachment to any particular type of material).... but in the 1950s you started to see directors who had a more personal vision entering into these fields.... directors who had been raised on serials and who appreciated their aesthetic qualities, which are very different from the artistic qualities of "A" pictures, and who wanted to pay tribute to the old serials and B movies while at the same time making new versions that appealed to a slightly more adult sensibility that was present in the 50s as opposed to the 30s and 40s. Ed Wood was basically the first of these, as far as I'm aware. I'm getting ahead of myself here to talk about the 70s, but in the 70s the successors to Ed Wood's dream of making bigger, splashier versions of the old serials and B pictures hit the jackpot -- people like Lucas and Spielberg, I mean.
Anyway, Ed Wood did NOT think that he was making "Gone with the Wind" when he made movies like "Plan 9 from Outer Space". I know Tim Burton's film gave this impression, along with a lot of other false (and some true) impressions, but in reality Ed Wood thought of himself as a B moviemaker, not as an A moviemaker. For those not aware, B movies are not just low budget versions of A movies. B movies have their own separate style, a style which actually originates in serialized magazine fiction of the early 20th century (now known as "pulp fiction" or "pulp fantasy" or "pulp detective stories", etc.). Examples of this genre of literature would include primarily Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan), Robert Howard (Conan) and HP Lovecraft (Cthulu...sp?). There was also a heavy influence, channeled through these serialized magazine stories, from 19th century adventure fiction, particularly Robert Louis Stevenson (whose "Treasure Island" and "Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde" along with others provided the rough templates for most of adventure/horror literature/film of the 20th century). This is in sharp contrast to the literary tradition from which most "A" films were drawing, which was more along the lines of whatever was popular on broadway or in "society" magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post".
"A" films placed its characters in very dramatic situations in which the main character usually had to make some kind of life decision between two opposing forces, usually whatever they personally desired and whatever society advocated. "Christopher Strong" is a textbook example of this type of film, or you can also look at "Little Women" or anything by Edna Ferber. The promotion of these films usually centered around getting an audience interested in the moral and/or ethical dilemnas..... often print advertising would say "what would you do?" or things of that nature. The acting in "A" films was very stylized and not what we would currently call "realistic", but it was designed to produce empathy from the audience.
"B" films are very different in their emphasis and in the promotion. You do not promote a B picture based on its narrative, you promote a B picture based on the spectacle it promises. "SEE! -- an underwater kingdom ruled by a dictator! SEE! -- outer space aliens invade the earth! SEE! -- the things your teenager does when you think they are safe at a weenie roast!" That kind of garbage. In exploitation films, the audience is not asked so much to empathize with the characters as to condemn them, although of course the typical audience at an exploitation feature would be paying to "SEE!" all the things they were supposed to be condemning. Anyway, the acting in B pictures is accordingly not focused on carrying the narrative force of the picture; rather it is focused on providing as much SPECTACLE as possible. The very first motion pictures were mostly pure exploitation films... many of them were ALL spectacle with NO narrative.... for instance Tom Edison produced a movie called "The Electrocution of an Elephant" which features nothing but said spectacle (pretty good exploitation value for 1905 or whatever). In the late teens, companies like Jewell/Universal produced dozens of "serial adventure" films which were actually made for adults, not children, and these were based on the serialized magazine fiction of the time. For instance, a "Polly" series was created based on the comic strip in Hearst publications and "Perils of Pauline" remains as the most famous of the old 1910s "cliffhanger" style serial adventure film for adults.
This emphasis on spectacle explains why in "A" films you have stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis who are MASTERS of what you'd call "emoting" or conveying a strong emotion to the audience, whereas in B pictures you had stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (or, in Westerns, Gene Autry) many of whom could not emote to save their lives, but who were either physically larger than life or had a hard-to-define charisma that made them seem larger than life on the screen. This would be the case with Lugosi, whose theatrical style and incredibly refined speaking voice were powerful tools of film illusion and spectacle. The dialogue in B films and serials was so eggagerated and stylized that it was hilarious to adults, even at the time, and this was intentional -- the films were designed to be played straight so children wouldn't think they were comedy, but so adults could "get" the joke.
I'm saying all of this to shed some light on the films of Ed Wood, of course. A lot of people say the acting in his movies is "bad", but I think for the most part (with exceptions like Dolores Fuller) the acting in his movies is actually really good B movie acting. It's hardly a coincidence that he goes out and hires the very best B actors of the "serial" generation. These were guys -- Bela Lugosi, Kenne Duncan, Tom Keene -- who really knew the kind of eggagerated, spectacle oriented acting that the kind of movie Ed Wood wanted to make required. Also, Ed Wood wanted to put them in films because he really admired their work and wanted to pay tribute to them, but mostly he was interested I'm sure in utilizing their unique talents for his films. Some people say he hired stars like these because they were the cheapest available, but this is not true.... on Wood's budget a star like Lugosi was actually quite expensive, and he coud easily have made films with more exploitation value and less star power if he had wanted to make that type of film. I think Wood was interested in making "pulp adventure" type films, and he stuck exploitation content into his films mostly to please the producers he was working for (in the case of "Glen or Glenda?", for example, additional S&M sequences were edited into the film at the insistence of producer George Weiss, who later created the infamous "Olga" series). Wood was pretty savvy about how much exploitation content he should use and what he could get away with for a "bad" film-maker who is supposed to be a total idiot.
The dialogue in Ed Wood's movies is one of the more interesting aspects of his films, and he chose actors to play the roles in his films who would give his dialogue the proper accentuation and emphasis. He was not looking for a "realistic" performance....... why would you want a realistic performance of such blatantly surrealistic dialogue? People keep telling me that Ed Wood "thought" he was a great writer. Well, Ed Wood published over 100 books I believe, so he had more right to that opinion than most of the posters here on the IMDB certainly. Wood was actually quite a juicy writer, his "pulp" dime novels are pretty racy and sensational, and there are similarities between many of his books and his films (especially "The Violent Years" and "The Sinister Urge"). I seriously doubt that Ed Wood was writing all these dime novels and making all these fantasy films, and putting this really eggagerated dialogue in them, all the time thinking that these were "realistic" books/movies or that he was doing something along the lines of "Gone with the Wind." He was not trying to make an A picture on a B budget, he was trying to make the ULTIMATE B films of the 1950s, with the best B cast (not many B films from the 50s can boast a cool cast like "Bride of the Monster" with Lugosi and Tor Johnson), and judging by the fact that people who are fans of "cult films" or "camp films" (terms that did not exist while Ed Wood was pioneering the form) rate his films as the very best in the category shows that he succeeded.
I don't think it's fair to say that Ed Wood's films were spoofs of the old serials and B programmers. I'd say they were more like tributes, but also he was trying to carry on that form of moviemaking. Hollywood was in a state of transition in the 1950s, and the volume and quality of B programmers was beginning to disappear as the movie studios were forced to sell their distribution units (movie theaters). Ed Wood was one of the first to see the opening in the market -- not so much because he was a genius, though he may have been, but moreso because he was a fan of this type of movie and was thinking to himself "why aren't they making those kind of movies anymore?". Wood knew that there was still an audience interested in seeing people like Bela Lugosi on film, and in seeing a film of this type. Also he could see that you could combine the old serial adventure format with exploitation value and create a film that could possibly incorporate enough elements from both exploitation and pulp/adventure genres to attract fans of both types of film. This approach was later adopted by Roger Corman, AIP, and several other film companies, but I will get into that further in the second part of this thread.
Hope I didn't bore you guys, hope I didn't leave anything important out, and I encourage all contributions to this discussion, though please try not to slam my opinions without telling me WHY you disagree. If you think Ed Wood was an incompetent moron who didn't have any clue what he was doing, that's fine..... 10 or maybe even 5 years ago I would have agreed with you. But as I get older and get deeper and deeper into the films of the 20th Century, I see more and more that Ed Wood was not a "horrible" film-maker... in fact I think he was pretty inspired, because he saw an opening that nobody else saw, a new type of film that used the tools of exploitation to sell films which actually evoked the old spirit of pure fantasy that is beloved by all of us who still enjoy the old serials and the "pulp fiction" that they are based on, all the way from E.R. Burroughs up through Raymond Chandler. And I do believe the acting in his films was deliberately stylized, although sometimes what we have on film is actually an inferior performance due to the constraints Wood's budget placed on him as far as retakes went. The production values could have been better, but look at the difference between "Bride of the Monster" and "Plan 9".... if Ed Wood was given slightly more money (Bride cost I believe about twice what Plan 9 cost) he was capable of producing a decent looking film. I take issue with the belief that Ed Wood's humor is unintentional..... I don't know if he meant the dialogue to be "laugh out loud" funny, but it is very stylized and done in a way that would tend to make people take the movie less seriously. I just don't think Ed Wood took his movies "seriously", and I don't think he expected or wanted his audience to do that either.... maybe that works for children, but not adults, sorry people not even adults in the 1950s, who were hardly the simpletons than a lot of films and TV shows from our era make them out to be. These were people (including Ed Wood) who had fought in WWII, they were people who knew the horrors of war, and they were mostly people who had the capacity (sadly, lost in many of us) to put themselves back into a simpler place and time and just enjoy themselves in a movie. As such, Ed Wood's movies are not designed to be comedy, but they are not 100% serious either. They are escapist entertainment, and they work fine on that level.
Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000248/board/flat/17045406
##Additional##
#Glen or Glenda#
"Glen or Glenda?" is even more interesting, an exploitation picture cooked up for George Weiss, producer of the "Olga" films. A famous case of a sex change (male to female) had occurred and it created national headlines. Wherever there are headlines, there will be film-makers exploiting the publicity of those headlines -- this is the original meaning of the term "exploitation film". The idea is that you don't have to pay to publicize your movie if it is on a "hot topic" that people are interested in and which is getting tons of free press. The desire to create controversy with your film is parallel to this strategy in exploitation. Anyway, George Weiss advertised in the trades that he was looking for someone to make a low-budget film based on the famous case (can't remember the name), and Ed Wood responded and managed to convince Weiss to give him the money to make "Glen or Glenda?". Instead of delivering a sex change picture complete with surgical footage which is probably what Weiss wanted, Ed Wood made a film about transvestitism with almost no exploitation value whatsoever. But -- Ed Wood's movie had heart, more heart than just about any exploitation film anyone had ever made before. Because when it came to the fetish of crossdressing, Ed Wood had his heart in it; he claimed to have stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day with a small pair of pink briefs under his uniform (he often joked that the fear of being discovered in such a state partly motivated him to stay alive!). Most exploitation films take on a tone of condemning their subject matter, i.e. "Reefer Madness" with the famous "yours -- and yours -- and yours!" speech where we are warned to keep our children away from soda pop fountains at department stores because they are a haven for weed dealers, and we are told that the drug makes people criminally insane (after they pass through a period of hysterical laughter, of course.... parents -- be on the lookout for laughing children! They could be dope fiends!). Ed Wood's "G or G" does not take this kind of condemnatory stance; instead it tries to explain a number of things about the TV lifestyle. For instance, Wood repeatedly points out that the common belief that all TV are homosexual is false. Surely we can see he has a vested personal interest in explaining it to people; nonetheless the fact that it was included is really interesting because this is a treatment of crossdressing that is beyond anything from at least the following 20 years in terms of its progressive stance on "sexual deviance". Ed Wood talks about how in many native tribes the men wore more bright and colorful clothing than the women (true), that not all TV are gay or all gays are TV (true), and that "sexual deviants" of this type are rarely dangerous to anyone other than themselves (true). In all of these things, Wood seeks to reverse a stereotype that was doubtless causing himself and his friends great pain. "Glen or Glenda?" is a deeply personal movie in many ways; not only is its social commentary apt to Ed's life, but he included his then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller (who I once had the pleasure of meeting; she truly is a graceful and intelligent lady who encouraged me to spread the word about the real Ed Wood like I'm doing) in skits which re-enacted events which very well may have originated in his own living room -- Fuller left Wood soon after the film's production because, as she states, she couldn't deal with his TV lifestyle.
I guess I just wanted to talk about "Glen or Glenda" in this context because I think it pretty clearly shows Ed Wood's progressive social bent. Amazingly, Ed Wood used the format of an exploitation movie to try to spread understanding and compassion. There are a few objectionable elements in the film, but most of these if not all were added by the producer Weiss who was apalled by the completed film's lack of exploitation value. Not wanting to shell out the money for surgical footage, Weiss instead inserted a couple cheaply produced burlesque scenes which were interposed with shots of Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi lifted from the rest of the film. When you see it, you should be aware that these "S&M" sequences were not part of the film as Ed Wood wanted it to be. A lot of people see those scenes and they think Wood was insane or something, but the actual fact is they were inserted after he was finished with the picture.
#On Lacking Talent#
It's also interesting to note that although Ed Wood has been mythologized into a guy who had extreme passion, dedication, and worked really hard on these movies but just didn't have any money or talent, in reality Ed Wood's biggest downfall, not shown at all by Tim Burton's film, was alcohol addiction. Ed may or may not have lacked talent, I personally think that as a writer he had a lot of talent, and as a director he probably could have done good work w/ a union crew and money for some re-shoots. People should look at Roger Corman's first few films for AIP and compare them in quality to his films of just 4 or 5 years later. More money and more experience, and I think Ed Wood could have held his own in the B movie universe of the 50s/60s. What really undid him was not money or lack of talent but rather alcoholism and a set of self-destructive tendencies, especially his habit of befriending the fringe dwellers of the Hollywood scene.
#On Being Trashy and Fun#
Ed Wood was trashy, he wasn't the first trashy or "exploitation" director, but what makes him particularly interesting is the way that he brought out his own personal fetishes in his films, especially the cross-dressing in "Glen or Glenda?" but all kinds of other fetishistic touches (Vampira's much too tight dresses, for example). His films feel much more personal than other exploitation films from the day. They feel like a personal statement, and that's why I think even so many who are convinced that he was completely incompetent still like the guy. It's one thing to laugh at a poorly constructed movie and another to get a feeling that you would like to know the man who made that film, and I think a lot of people get that feeling even if they do tend to look down on Eddie's films. There's a kind of warmth in the films, you can feel his affection for the actors and the fact that he really enjoys and cares about the genre as well when he was working on Westerns and Horror.
That's why some people wonder why I continue to find his films amusing even though I don't think of them as "bad films" per se. They're low budget films, most of the actors aren't very good, but if you watch a lot of B movies from the period in the end it's Ed Wood's movies that stick with you far more than Eddie Cahn's or a lot of those other guys. I think it's because Ed Wood was having fun, his actors were having fun, and he wanted the movies to be fun. Believe it or not a lot of the B movie directors from that period really didn't have much fun making movies and didn't really respect the type of film they were making. Ed Wood loved those types of movies and he didn't look down on the audience for those types of movies, rather I think he consciously created films that would appeal to them.
I know my viewpoint on Ed Wood films may be unconventional, but I want to post some of my thoughts on his films, and then I will probably start another thread to discuss his impact on Hollywood history, which I believe is greater than is generally believed.
OK, first of all, I am not one of those who thinks Ed Wood is a "bad" director..... certainly not the "worst director" in the history of film. For one thing, his films have a distinctive style. Some of this is from his visual style, some of it is from the actors he employed, and some is from his bizarre dialogue. I will go into all of these areas as briefly as I can. But generally, what I'm saying is that no director who has a distinctive style can be the "worst". The worst director would be one who makes very impersonal films that cannot be distinguished from anyone else's movies. I believe that Ed Wood was fairly unique among the B moviemakers of the early 50s in that he seemed to CARE about the films he was making, the actors he was working with, and even the genre he was working in. Most directors who worked in the Western and Science Fiction/horror genres as Wood did at that time do not have any love for those genres (for example, Nathan Juran, Chuck Beaumont, Edward Kahn, they were all basically workmen who had no personal attachment to any particular type of material).... but in the 1950s you started to see directors who had a more personal vision entering into these fields.... directors who had been raised on serials and who appreciated their aesthetic qualities, which are very different from the artistic qualities of "A" pictures, and who wanted to pay tribute to the old serials and B movies while at the same time making new versions that appealed to a slightly more adult sensibility that was present in the 50s as opposed to the 30s and 40s. Ed Wood was basically the first of these, as far as I'm aware. I'm getting ahead of myself here to talk about the 70s, but in the 70s the successors to Ed Wood's dream of making bigger, splashier versions of the old serials and B pictures hit the jackpot -- people like Lucas and Spielberg, I mean.
Anyway, Ed Wood did NOT think that he was making "Gone with the Wind" when he made movies like "Plan 9 from Outer Space". I know Tim Burton's film gave this impression, along with a lot of other false (and some true) impressions, but in reality Ed Wood thought of himself as a B moviemaker, not as an A moviemaker. For those not aware, B movies are not just low budget versions of A movies. B movies have their own separate style, a style which actually originates in serialized magazine fiction of the early 20th century (now known as "pulp fiction" or "pulp fantasy" or "pulp detective stories", etc.). Examples of this genre of literature would include primarily Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan), Robert Howard (Conan) and HP Lovecraft (Cthulu...sp?). There was also a heavy influence, channeled through these serialized magazine stories, from 19th century adventure fiction, particularly Robert Louis Stevenson (whose "Treasure Island" and "Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde" along with others provided the rough templates for most of adventure/horror literature/film of the 20th century). This is in sharp contrast to the literary tradition from which most "A" films were drawing, which was more along the lines of whatever was popular on broadway or in "society" magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post".
"A" films placed its characters in very dramatic situations in which the main character usually had to make some kind of life decision between two opposing forces, usually whatever they personally desired and whatever society advocated. "Christopher Strong" is a textbook example of this type of film, or you can also look at "Little Women" or anything by Edna Ferber. The promotion of these films usually centered around getting an audience interested in the moral and/or ethical dilemnas..... often print advertising would say "what would you do?" or things of that nature. The acting in "A" films was very stylized and not what we would currently call "realistic", but it was designed to produce empathy from the audience.
"B" films are very different in their emphasis and in the promotion. You do not promote a B picture based on its narrative, you promote a B picture based on the spectacle it promises. "SEE! -- an underwater kingdom ruled by a dictator! SEE! -- outer space aliens invade the earth! SEE! -- the things your teenager does when you think they are safe at a weenie roast!" That kind of garbage. In exploitation films, the audience is not asked so much to empathize with the characters as to condemn them, although of course the typical audience at an exploitation feature would be paying to "SEE!" all the things they were supposed to be condemning. Anyway, the acting in B pictures is accordingly not focused on carrying the narrative force of the picture; rather it is focused on providing as much SPECTACLE as possible. The very first motion pictures were mostly pure exploitation films... many of them were ALL spectacle with NO narrative.... for instance Tom Edison produced a movie called "The Electrocution of an Elephant" which features nothing but said spectacle (pretty good exploitation value for 1905 or whatever). In the late teens, companies like Jewell/Universal produced dozens of "serial adventure" films which were actually made for adults, not children, and these were based on the serialized magazine fiction of the time. For instance, a "Polly" series was created based on the comic strip in Hearst publications and "Perils of Pauline" remains as the most famous of the old 1910s "cliffhanger" style serial adventure film for adults.
This emphasis on spectacle explains why in "A" films you have stars like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis who are MASTERS of what you'd call "emoting" or conveying a strong emotion to the audience, whereas in B pictures you had stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (or, in Westerns, Gene Autry) many of whom could not emote to save their lives, but who were either physically larger than life or had a hard-to-define charisma that made them seem larger than life on the screen. This would be the case with Lugosi, whose theatrical style and incredibly refined speaking voice were powerful tools of film illusion and spectacle. The dialogue in B films and serials was so eggagerated and stylized that it was hilarious to adults, even at the time, and this was intentional -- the films were designed to be played straight so children wouldn't think they were comedy, but so adults could "get" the joke.
I'm saying all of this to shed some light on the films of Ed Wood, of course. A lot of people say the acting in his movies is "bad", but I think for the most part (with exceptions like Dolores Fuller) the acting in his movies is actually really good B movie acting. It's hardly a coincidence that he goes out and hires the very best B actors of the "serial" generation. These were guys -- Bela Lugosi, Kenne Duncan, Tom Keene -- who really knew the kind of eggagerated, spectacle oriented acting that the kind of movie Ed Wood wanted to make required. Also, Ed Wood wanted to put them in films because he really admired their work and wanted to pay tribute to them, but mostly he was interested I'm sure in utilizing their unique talents for his films. Some people say he hired stars like these because they were the cheapest available, but this is not true.... on Wood's budget a star like Lugosi was actually quite expensive, and he coud easily have made films with more exploitation value and less star power if he had wanted to make that type of film. I think Wood was interested in making "pulp adventure" type films, and he stuck exploitation content into his films mostly to please the producers he was working for (in the case of "Glen or Glenda?", for example, additional S&M sequences were edited into the film at the insistence of producer George Weiss, who later created the infamous "Olga" series). Wood was pretty savvy about how much exploitation content he should use and what he could get away with for a "bad" film-maker who is supposed to be a total idiot.
The dialogue in Ed Wood's movies is one of the more interesting aspects of his films, and he chose actors to play the roles in his films who would give his dialogue the proper accentuation and emphasis. He was not looking for a "realistic" performance....... why would you want a realistic performance of such blatantly surrealistic dialogue? People keep telling me that Ed Wood "thought" he was a great writer. Well, Ed Wood published over 100 books I believe, so he had more right to that opinion than most of the posters here on the IMDB certainly. Wood was actually quite a juicy writer, his "pulp" dime novels are pretty racy and sensational, and there are similarities between many of his books and his films (especially "The Violent Years" and "The Sinister Urge"). I seriously doubt that Ed Wood was writing all these dime novels and making all these fantasy films, and putting this really eggagerated dialogue in them, all the time thinking that these were "realistic" books/movies or that he was doing something along the lines of "Gone with the Wind." He was not trying to make an A picture on a B budget, he was trying to make the ULTIMATE B films of the 1950s, with the best B cast (not many B films from the 50s can boast a cool cast like "Bride of the Monster" with Lugosi and Tor Johnson), and judging by the fact that people who are fans of "cult films" or "camp films" (terms that did not exist while Ed Wood was pioneering the form) rate his films as the very best in the category shows that he succeeded.
I don't think it's fair to say that Ed Wood's films were spoofs of the old serials and B programmers. I'd say they were more like tributes, but also he was trying to carry on that form of moviemaking. Hollywood was in a state of transition in the 1950s, and the volume and quality of B programmers was beginning to disappear as the movie studios were forced to sell their distribution units (movie theaters). Ed Wood was one of the first to see the opening in the market -- not so much because he was a genius, though he may have been, but moreso because he was a fan of this type of movie and was thinking to himself "why aren't they making those kind of movies anymore?". Wood knew that there was still an audience interested in seeing people like Bela Lugosi on film, and in seeing a film of this type. Also he could see that you could combine the old serial adventure format with exploitation value and create a film that could possibly incorporate enough elements from both exploitation and pulp/adventure genres to attract fans of both types of film. This approach was later adopted by Roger Corman, AIP, and several other film companies, but I will get into that further in the second part of this thread.
Hope I didn't bore you guys, hope I didn't leave anything important out, and I encourage all contributions to this discussion, though please try not to slam my opinions without telling me WHY you disagree. If you think Ed Wood was an incompetent moron who didn't have any clue what he was doing, that's fine..... 10 or maybe even 5 years ago I would have agreed with you. But as I get older and get deeper and deeper into the films of the 20th Century, I see more and more that Ed Wood was not a "horrible" film-maker... in fact I think he was pretty inspired, because he saw an opening that nobody else saw, a new type of film that used the tools of exploitation to sell films which actually evoked the old spirit of pure fantasy that is beloved by all of us who still enjoy the old serials and the "pulp fiction" that they are based on, all the way from E.R. Burroughs up through Raymond Chandler. And I do believe the acting in his films was deliberately stylized, although sometimes what we have on film is actually an inferior performance due to the constraints Wood's budget placed on him as far as retakes went. The production values could have been better, but look at the difference between "Bride of the Monster" and "Plan 9".... if Ed Wood was given slightly more money (Bride cost I believe about twice what Plan 9 cost) he was capable of producing a decent looking film. I take issue with the belief that Ed Wood's humor is unintentional..... I don't know if he meant the dialogue to be "laugh out loud" funny, but it is very stylized and done in a way that would tend to make people take the movie less seriously. I just don't think Ed Wood took his movies "seriously", and I don't think he expected or wanted his audience to do that either.... maybe that works for children, but not adults, sorry people not even adults in the 1950s, who were hardly the simpletons than a lot of films and TV shows from our era make them out to be. These were people (including Ed Wood) who had fought in WWII, they were people who knew the horrors of war, and they were mostly people who had the capacity (sadly, lost in many of us) to put themselves back into a simpler place and time and just enjoy themselves in a movie. As such, Ed Wood's movies are not designed to be comedy, but they are not 100% serious either. They are escapist entertainment, and they work fine on that level.
Source: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000248/board/flat/17045406
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#Glen or Glenda#
"Glen or Glenda?" is even more interesting, an exploitation picture cooked up for George Weiss, producer of the "Olga" films. A famous case of a sex change (male to female) had occurred and it created national headlines. Wherever there are headlines, there will be film-makers exploiting the publicity of those headlines -- this is the original meaning of the term "exploitation film". The idea is that you don't have to pay to publicize your movie if it is on a "hot topic" that people are interested in and which is getting tons of free press. The desire to create controversy with your film is parallel to this strategy in exploitation. Anyway, George Weiss advertised in the trades that he was looking for someone to make a low-budget film based on the famous case (can't remember the name), and Ed Wood responded and managed to convince Weiss to give him the money to make "Glen or Glenda?". Instead of delivering a sex change picture complete with surgical footage which is probably what Weiss wanted, Ed Wood made a film about transvestitism with almost no exploitation value whatsoever. But -- Ed Wood's movie had heart, more heart than just about any exploitation film anyone had ever made before. Because when it came to the fetish of crossdressing, Ed Wood had his heart in it; he claimed to have stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day with a small pair of pink briefs under his uniform (he often joked that the fear of being discovered in such a state partly motivated him to stay alive!). Most exploitation films take on a tone of condemning their subject matter, i.e. "Reefer Madness" with the famous "yours -- and yours -- and yours!" speech where we are warned to keep our children away from soda pop fountains at department stores because they are a haven for weed dealers, and we are told that the drug makes people criminally insane (after they pass through a period of hysterical laughter, of course.... parents -- be on the lookout for laughing children! They could be dope fiends!). Ed Wood's "G or G" does not take this kind of condemnatory stance; instead it tries to explain a number of things about the TV lifestyle. For instance, Wood repeatedly points out that the common belief that all TV are homosexual is false. Surely we can see he has a vested personal interest in explaining it to people; nonetheless the fact that it was included is really interesting because this is a treatment of crossdressing that is beyond anything from at least the following 20 years in terms of its progressive stance on "sexual deviance". Ed Wood talks about how in many native tribes the men wore more bright and colorful clothing than the women (true), that not all TV are gay or all gays are TV (true), and that "sexual deviants" of this type are rarely dangerous to anyone other than themselves (true). In all of these things, Wood seeks to reverse a stereotype that was doubtless causing himself and his friends great pain. "Glen or Glenda?" is a deeply personal movie in many ways; not only is its social commentary apt to Ed's life, but he included his then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller (who I once had the pleasure of meeting; she truly is a graceful and intelligent lady who encouraged me to spread the word about the real Ed Wood like I'm doing) in skits which re-enacted events which very well may have originated in his own living room -- Fuller left Wood soon after the film's production because, as she states, she couldn't deal with his TV lifestyle.
I guess I just wanted to talk about "Glen or Glenda" in this context because I think it pretty clearly shows Ed Wood's progressive social bent. Amazingly, Ed Wood used the format of an exploitation movie to try to spread understanding and compassion. There are a few objectionable elements in the film, but most of these if not all were added by the producer Weiss who was apalled by the completed film's lack of exploitation value. Not wanting to shell out the money for surgical footage, Weiss instead inserted a couple cheaply produced burlesque scenes which were interposed with shots of Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi lifted from the rest of the film. When you see it, you should be aware that these "S&M" sequences were not part of the film as Ed Wood wanted it to be. A lot of people see those scenes and they think Wood was insane or something, but the actual fact is they were inserted after he was finished with the picture.
#On Lacking Talent#
It's also interesting to note that although Ed Wood has been mythologized into a guy who had extreme passion, dedication, and worked really hard on these movies but just didn't have any money or talent, in reality Ed Wood's biggest downfall, not shown at all by Tim Burton's film, was alcohol addiction. Ed may or may not have lacked talent, I personally think that as a writer he had a lot of talent, and as a director he probably could have done good work w/ a union crew and money for some re-shoots. People should look at Roger Corman's first few films for AIP and compare them in quality to his films of just 4 or 5 years later. More money and more experience, and I think Ed Wood could have held his own in the B movie universe of the 50s/60s. What really undid him was not money or lack of talent but rather alcoholism and a set of self-destructive tendencies, especially his habit of befriending the fringe dwellers of the Hollywood scene.
#On Being Trashy and Fun#
Ed Wood was trashy, he wasn't the first trashy or "exploitation" director, but what makes him particularly interesting is the way that he brought out his own personal fetishes in his films, especially the cross-dressing in "Glen or Glenda?" but all kinds of other fetishistic touches (Vampira's much too tight dresses, for example). His films feel much more personal than other exploitation films from the day. They feel like a personal statement, and that's why I think even so many who are convinced that he was completely incompetent still like the guy. It's one thing to laugh at a poorly constructed movie and another to get a feeling that you would like to know the man who made that film, and I think a lot of people get that feeling even if they do tend to look down on Eddie's films. There's a kind of warmth in the films, you can feel his affection for the actors and the fact that he really enjoys and cares about the genre as well when he was working on Westerns and Horror.
That's why some people wonder why I continue to find his films amusing even though I don't think of them as "bad films" per se. They're low budget films, most of the actors aren't very good, but if you watch a lot of B movies from the period in the end it's Ed Wood's movies that stick with you far more than Eddie Cahn's or a lot of those other guys. I think it's because Ed Wood was having fun, his actors were having fun, and he wanted the movies to be fun. Believe it or not a lot of the B movie directors from that period really didn't have much fun making movies and didn't really respect the type of film they were making. Ed Wood loved those types of movies and he didn't look down on the audience for those types of movies, rather I think he consciously created films that would appeal to them.
