Biography
Edward D. Wood Jr. is one of the great enigmas of American cinema. A marginal cinematic figure in his own time, Wood and his movies have become objects of fascination for legions of cineastes and pop-culture enthusiasts in the decades since his death in 1978. Not only have Wood's bizarre life and career been chronicled in books and videos, but they became the basis of a feature film -- made on a budget that Wood could only dream of -- in the form of
Tim Burton's
Ed Wood in 1994. Wood's movies, with their strange, otherworldly characters, compositions, and dialogue, exist on a level all their own. With the possible exception of
Bride of the Monster, his movies were considered incomprehensible at the time of their original release, and had all but disappeared from television by the end of the 1960s. Beginning in the summer of 1980, however, some 20 months after his death, the rediscovery of Ed Wood began with the presentation of
Plan 9 From Outer Space at New York's Beacon Theater. The audience of 2,000 was certainly the largest group of viewers ever to personally attend a single showing of one of Wood's movies. That screening was presented in conjunction with the posthumous presentation to Wood of the Golden Turkey Award as "The Worst Filmmaker of All Time." The "award" was singularly unfair -- there are poorer filmmakers than Edward D. Wood Jr. and far worse feature films than
Plan 9 From Outer Space (Wood even made a couple that were worse) -- though the screening, its attendant publicity, and its inherent comical condemnation were essential in heralding the reappraisal of his work.
Wood's principal filmmaking career lasted from 1953 until 1960. Born in Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1924, the son of a United States Post Office maintenance man and a jewelry buyer for a department store, Edward Davis Wood Jr. developed a keen fascination with movies early in life, and as a boy shot his own amateur films. He was employed at a local theater, first as an usher and later as an assistant manager, which allowed him to begin collecting movie posters, stills, and other memorabilia. It was also during his childhood and teenage years that Wood began manifesting the sexual confusion that preceded the transvestism that he displayed as an adult. He made it to Hollywood after serving in the Marine Corps during World War II. In the late '40s, he bore a slight resemblance to
Errol Flynn, but this didn't give him much to offer. He had enthusiasm but very little ability and no experience beyond what he'd acquired growing up in a small upstate New York town and from a single dramatics course after the war. He mostly worked in shoestring theater productions, with the occasional extra and basic stunt work in low-budget films. By this time, Wood was also a full-fledged transvestite in his private life, with a special fixation on white Angora sweaters. He became a denizen of the lowest strata of the Hollywood social order, alongside would-be actors, former stars who had fallen badly, and numerous poseurs. Ed Wood had goals beyond acting, however. He wanted to write, produce, and direct movies.
Wood's first feature, Glen or Glenda?, was an impassioned (albeit sometimes confusing) personal statement about transvestites and the torment that they face over their sexual confusion. The movie -- in which Wood starred (under the name Daniel Davis) -- was shot in ten days for 35,000 dollars. Released in 1953 at the outset of the Eisenhower era, Glen or Glenda? wasn't seen or heard of much beyond the exploitation film circuit for which it was produced. Ironically, the movie was an object of fascination for decades among one major group of filmgoers who cared nothing about sexual confusion -- horror film buffs pondered and speculated endlessly about the movie, owing to the presence of
Bela Lugosi in its cast. Glen or Glenda? was next to impossible to find and even locating anyone who had ever seen it (or would admit to having seen it) was difficult; but there it was, a title in Lugosi's filmography beckoning horror movie buffs. Lugosi played "the spiritual puppeteer of life," uttering bizarre pronouncements from a vantage point removed from the film's action and appearing onscreen for a total of perhaps 15 minutes, all for a 1,000-dollar fee, which was as much as Wood ever paid any single actor.
The relationship between Wood and Lugosi was essential to what little success Wood enjoyed and provided Lugosi with some of the last work of his career. The one-time stage and film star, who brought the character of Dracula to life in the theater at the end of the 1920s and on film in 1931, had begun falling on hard times in the late '30s, and by the early '50s he had publicly revealed an addiction to morphine, the origins of which dated back to a wound suffered during his military service in World War I. In 1953, when no one else was willing to hire him, Wood put Lugosi into Glen or Glenda?,
Bride of the Monster, and the movie that became
Plan 9 From Outer Space. Wood needed Lugosi as much as Lugosi needed him. The actor was still a somewhat bankable name on theater marquees and a solid talking point with potential backers who remembered him from
Dracula and his other '30s horror movies; Lugosi's presence in
Bride of the Monster and
Plan 9 From Outer Space made sure that both movies were at least discussed and were widely shown on television, which wasn't true of any of Wood's other films. What's more, his three films for Wood, although they weren't remotely in a league with Lugosi's work of the 1930s, were the most interesting movies of his later career.
Wood had a filmmaker's soul -- he reportedly idolized
Orson Welles. He was hemmed in, in terms of what he did with film, by his middle-class background and his existence on the marginal side of life, owing to his transvestism; whereas Welles had enjoyed a childhood and teenage years of adventure, travel, and exotic experiences, among other locales. As a filmmaker, Wood's approach to directing a scene was recalled by the late
Steve Reeves -- who co-starred in Wood's 1954 crime drama
Jail Bait -- in an interview with Roy Frumkes in Perfect Vision magazine: "[He] let you do things the way you wanted to, and if they weren't quite right he would direct you. The shoot lasted two or three weeks for me, off and on." That "off and on" was typical of a Wood production, for he was frequently raising his financing during production. He would proceed with shooting when he'd secured the money to pay for it, a day here, two or three days there. Such was his reputation for not always paying bills, that when
Gregory Walcott went to pick up the pilot's uniform that he wore for part of
Plan 9 From Outer Space, the costume company insisted on payment in full, in cash, in advance.
Wood's films were strange.
Jail Bait, from 1954, was a somewhat misleading title, dealing with a wealthy young man's lethal descent into a life of crime;
Bride of the Monster was about a mad scientist trying to make giant-sized zombies out of the people he captures with the help of his mute, hulking helper (
Tor Johnson) and an octopus that he releases into a swamp;
Plan 9 From Outer Space was about effeminate aliens trying to resurrect the dead for some incomprehensible purpose; and
The Sinister Urge was about a pornography racket. Wood may have had a filmmaker's soul, but he lacked a filmmaker's mind. The spirit was willing, but the judgment and, undoubtedly, the talent, were lacking. Other filmmakers -- even
Alfred Hitchcock in
North by Northwest -- have occasionally had problems with continuity, mismatching shots in the same scene, but with Wood, even such basics as matching day and night shots were seemingly beyond his ability. Yet his movies are not without interest. Writing in Randy Simon and Harold Benjamin's Edward D. Wood Jr. -- A Man and His Films, philosopher M.J. Kelar cited Wood as a perfect example of "anti-genius." In describing the spellbinding nature of Wood's work, and the process of absorbing it as a member of the audience, Kelar's essay "Signals From a Dark Saucer" cites "the viewer's rapt anticipation of the next wrong move. It is the mirror image of what one feels while watching a work by a master, and awaiting the next splendid piece of information. These feelings stand opposite one another in just the way that the feelings of going up in an elevator, and of going down in an elevator, stand opposite one another."
Wood's
Jail Bait, his first "mainstream" film, may be the strangest crime drama ever made, in such details as the tiny gun carried by the doomed guard in the hold-up scene; the "revelation" scene in which Don Gregor's (Clancy Malone) corpse tumbles out from behind the curtain behind which it has been hidden, standing erect; the uncovering of Vic Brady's (
Timothy Farrell) surgically altered face; and Lieutentant Bob Lawrence's (
Steve Reeves) brief bare-chested scene in the detective squad room. The aliens in
Plan 9 From Outer Space, for all of their foibles and occasional eccentricities (like the fey, effeminate manner of several of the males), are the most normal-speaking and normal-acting characters in the movie. And nothing and nobody in
Night of the Ghouls, Wood's lost sequel to
Bride of the Monster and
Plan 9 From Outer Space, is normal. Restricted in his budgets and shooting schedules, and limited in his writing (especially where dialogue was concerned), but perhaps a little more comfortable with sexually tinged argot that the typical screenwriter, Wood at his best created grotesque but spellbinding visions of humanity, filtered through the prism (or was it a prison?) of his own mind. Alas, the public didn't see it that way. His movies were largely unseen and usually unreviewed, and were most often reviled when they ended up being written about at all.
From Glen or Glenda? in 1953 until
The Sinister Urge in 1960, Wood's best efforts went pathetically awry. He managed to survive the death of
Bela Lugosi in 1956 by including a couple of minutes of silent footage of the actor, from a film that was never made, in
Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Lugosi's name in the credits raised enough interest to get the movie released, but Wood's career was on borrowed time after that. He was so hard up for funds to finish
Night of the Ghouls, his first post-Lugosi horror film, that it ended up the property of the lab that processed it because Wood was unable to pay the bill. Monetary problems of a somewhat similar nature had plagued
Orson Welles throughout his career, but he could always finance another few weeks' shooting on
Othello or
Chimes at Midnight by making an appearance on television, or in someone else's film as an actor for a quick 100,000 dollars. Wood had no such options -- the best gig he ever had to pick up some extra cash was by turning in the screenplay to the low-budget horror/adventure movie
The Bride and the Beast in 1958, and possibly making a little money as a consultant to
Ronnie Ashcroft on the neophyte filmmaker's
The Astounding She-Monster that same year. During the 1960s and '70s, he scratched out a living writing pornographic novels; he may have written over 100 paperbacks with titles along the lines of Raped in the Grass and Young, Gay & Black. He also occasionally scripted, acted, and directed ultra low-budget exploitation movies such as
Orgy of the Dead. It was a sad existence for Wood and his wife Kathy (and their dogs), and it ended in late 1978, after the last in a series of evictions, when the director died, apparently of heart failure, at the age of 54. Starting just five years later, Wood's name became synonymous with jokes about bad filmmaking, but his movies were suddenly also counted among the most watched B-pictures of any era. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide