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Common knowledge has it that Ed Wood is the worst director of all
time ... but, as I frequently point out, common knowledge is an idiot.
It is true that Ed Wood lacked several skills concerning the craft
of filmmaking, and he made most of his films on a shoestring (or less than
that), and the films look it too ... but then again, filmmaking is not so
much a craft as an art, and the quality of a film simply cannot be
measured by a high budget (even if Hollywood tries to tell you otherwise,
while stuffing one piece after another of mediocricy down your throat). In
my book, how can a guy be the worst director of all time if his
films are still readily available (and repeatedly re-released) half
a century half a century after they were made, and if they are still enjoyable (if sometimes for the wrong
reasons) after all that time and fondly remembered even by those who (like
myself) were far from being around when they originally played ? It is
true of course that Ed Wood was no big craftsman, and he was certainly not
the next Orson Welles, the man he most frequently compared himself to - but when
watching his movies back-to-back one can't but register a personal style
permeating almost all of his films, be it his fascination with pulp
motives, with macabre details and with surrealism done on the cheap, be it
his tendency to let his characters lose themselves in long and preachy but
also utterly silly monologues and dialogues, be it his boyishly great
ambitions paired with an incredible lack for detail, be it the
transvestites who turned up in his films decades before this became cool,
or be it simply his predilection for angora sweaters his female (and
occasionally male) characters tend to wear ...
The career of Ed
Wood though was a tragic one, he was a man full of ideas and full of
ambition to make them reality, but for some reason or another, he never
found the proper outlet to do so and all of his life worked for cheapskate
producers and sleazy distributors who did not care much for a man with
a vision but more for someone who could deliver the goods on Tuesday
... add to all this chronic depression, chronic (and increasing)
alcoholism, and the fact that he was a (heterosexual) crossdresser in a
time way before the general public accepted transvestitism (does the
general public even now ?), and you have a career that spells failure - and yet, almost 30
years after his death Ed Wood is still a household name, books are written
about him, websites are dedicated to him, a big budget motion picture (Ed
Wood) was made about him in 1994 directed by Tim Burton, several films
of his are remade, unfilmed novels and screenplays are finally cast into
celluloid, and - most surprisingly and weirdly enough - he has become the
official saviour of his own church - The Church of Ed Wood - in
1996, 18 years after his death. Unfortunately, Ed Wood did not
witness this late fame and glory, he died in 1978, on the eve of his
rediscovery, and he died a poor man ... But I'm getting way
ahead of myself now, let us - as usual - start at the beginning: Ed
Wood was born Edward Davis Wood jr 1924 in Poughkeepsie, New York, as the
son of a postal worker. Young Ed soon developed a love for comic books,
pulps and the cinema, and growing up during the 1930's, he witnessed a
golden age in all these media. Of special mention might be the early films
of the Universal
horror cycle - especially Dracula
(1931, Tod Browning), Frankenstein
(1931, James Whale), The Mummy
(1932, Karl Freund) and The
Black Cat (1934, Edward G.Ulmer), the last of which Wood actually
wanted to remake as Doctor Voodoo in 1954 starring the leads of the original, Borid Karloff and
Bela Lugosi - and the myriad of B-Westerns that came out during that era,
which all had a huge influence on Ed's own films. There is a rumour that
his mother made him periodically wear girls cloths until age 12, which in
later life caused him to be a transvestite, but this sounds like a way too
simple explanation for a way more complex phenomenon.
In 1941,
when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and the USA subsequently entered World
War II, Ed was 17, and he was drafted by the United States Marine Corps
the next year and stationed in the South and Central Pacific. During his
war years, he proved himself to be quite a tough guy,
taking part in combat in the Marshall Islands and Naumea and being one
of only 400 American survivors (out of 4,000 GIs) of the invasion of
Tarawa, where he got most of his front teeth knocked out ... Later he
served as an intelligence agent in the South Pacific until one of his legs
got machine-gunned and he caught gangrene, forcing him to serve the
remainder of his stint at the army doing office duty - where he learned
how to use a typewriter, a talent which would come handy in his later
life. Wood was discharged from the army in 1946 at the rank of Corporal
and was during his service decorated with the Bronze and Silver
Stars,
two Purple Hearts, and the Sharpshooter's Medal. This
is all in harsh contrast to his claim that he frequently went into battle
wearing bra and panties under his uniform ... which might just as well be
a slight exaggeration (meaning friendly lie) on his behalf , but it has
since become the stuff of legend. After the war was over, Wood
started to study the Dramatic Arts in Washington DC for a little while,
but soon his - shall we say - darker side got the better of him and he
went touring the country with a freak show , playing first the geek who
bites the heads off live chicken, then Half Man/Half Woman, a role
that might have been very much after his taste.
Wood eventually
arrived in Hollywood in 1947. His enthusiasm and his good looks (he was a
very handsome man in the 1940's and 50's, which is hard to believe when
seeing him on later photographs) soon helped him to find acting jobs in
various stage productions. In 1948, Wood directs his first
(short) film, Crossroads
of Laredo, a Western starring Duke Moore. However, the movie,
which was shot silent with music, sound effects and dialogue later to be
added, was never quite finished during Ed's lifetime as producer John
Crawford Thomas - whom Ed had talked into producing it in the first place - ran out of money
(which was provided by his parents) and Ed Wood made a disappearing act. Actually,
Ed had already filmed all the footage and edited it together when it
turned out there was no money left for dubbing. For the longest time after
that, John Crawford Thomas was left with a silent Ed Wood film ... until
in 1995, the odds had turned in his favour and he and former Ed Wood actress, girlfriend and protegee Dolores Fuller found backers to dub the
film after all - with at best mixed results. The film itself certainly
shows its limitations: It was obviously done on the dirt-cheap, on shoddy
outdoor sets, and without much re-shooting (when in one scene a horse
steps in between two men fighting it out in a duel, the duelists just move
a couple of steps to one side rather than get the horse out of the picture
or even reshoot the whole scene - then again though, this might be realism
for you). In defense of the film it has to be noted that many
independently shot B-Westerns of the 1930's and 40's (and even some done
by the smaller established companies like Monogram
and PRC) shared
Crossroads of Laredo's
shoddy looks and budgetary restraints, so Wood was in good company. With
Crossroads of Laredo
not being released, Wood's Hollywood career seemed to go nowhere before it
had actually begun, but that didn't deter Wood from going on, and going
strong: In 1948, Wood formed his own drama group and brought to the
stage The Casual Company, a play about the Marine Corps written by
himself. The play however proved to be a failure and closed after only one
week. Fortunately for him, other theatre work proved to be more successful
to keep him in employ the next year or two ... In 1950, Ed Wood
found work as a stuntman on Sam Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, a
job that required him to be - much to his amazement - in drag. In
1951, Wood directs his first finished movie, The Sun was Setting,
actually a half-hour TV-drama about a dying woman who wants to see
Chinatown one more time before her death starring Angela Stevens, Tom
Keene and Phyllis Coates, but the film was certainly less than memorable. In
1952, Ed co-wrote the Western The Lawless Rider with that film's
star, veteran cowboy Johnny Carpenter. The film, directed by stunt legend
Yakima Canutt, was however not released until two years later. Eventually,
Johnny Carpenter would pop up again in Wood's Night
of the Ghouls (1958), but more of that later.
1953
marked the year of the first classic Ed Wood film, Glen
or Glenda, a film that on one hand desperately tried to cash in on
the then recent sex-change operation of Christine Jorgensen, the ex-GI
turned glamour girl - which was big news at the time -, on the other hand
though it was also Ed's most personal film: basically, the film is about a
transvestite - played by Wood himself under the alias Daniel Davis -,
whose girlfriend (Dolores Fuller, who also was his real-life girlfriend
at the time) has to come to terms with his crossdressing - with a second
story about a man having a sex-change added on at virtually the last
minute. In writing, this all sounds like a dull drama full of phony
psychology, but in Ed Wood's hand, the story of the poor transvestite
turns into a totally spaced out piece of (undenyably cheap and corny)
surrealism - heck, Wood even found a way to work both the devil and Bela
Lugosi [Bela Lugosi bio - click
here], playing a godlike scientist/puppeteer, into his film. Actually,
Ed had met Bela Lugosi, the idol of his childhood, only a few weeks earlier, and when he learned how washed-out poor Bela - who at the time
was unemployed and addicted to morphine - was, he offered him a job in his
film, which Bela gratefully accepted. The friendship of Ed and Bela lasted
until Bela's death in 1956. In later years, Bela's son Bela Lugosi jr
would often claim that it was Ed Wood's fault that his dad's career has
reached a dead end - which is not quite fair, it is pretty safe to say
that his drug addiction got Bela to where he was, at a point where he had
to be happy to be hired for even cheapskate productions like the Ed
Wood-films he was in. And apart from that, Ed was known to help Bela
frequently with stage- and TV-appearances during the remainder of his
career, as a director, a dialogue coach, an errand boy, or whatever Bela
needed - which in my eyes is far from exploiting him. Besides Ed himself,
Dolores Fuller and Bela Lugosi, Glen
or Glenda also featured the first performance of Conrad Brooks in
an Ed Wood-film, in not one but several peripheral roles (hardly more than
bit-parts actually). Brooks would from here on appear in every Ed Wood
feature up until The Sinister
Urge (1961) and in later years (circa from the mid-1980's onwards)
turn himself into a cult figure of the independent-scene, mainly thanks to
his association with Wood. He would also wind up playing a part in Tim
Burton's Ed Wood, by the way.
Glen
or Glenda was produced by George Weiss, a young small-frye
producer who back then had only a few films under his belt - one with the
irresistible title Test Tube Babies (1948, W. Merle Connell) - but
would go on to produce a variety of films that can be easily identified as
sleaze even by their titles: Key-Hole Varieties (1954), Nudist
Life (1961, Maurice H. Zouary), White Slaves of Chinatown and Olga's
House of Shame (both 1964, Joseph P. Mawra), to name but a few. It's
rather obvious that Weiss did not care much about the compelling portrayal
of a transvestite but was betting on the exploitation angle of the
subject. It is not known what he personally thought about the final film,
but basically Weiss was a moneyman, and as long as something could get
made quickly - principal shooting on Glen
or Glenda did take no more than 5 days - and cheaply and could be
sold, it was ok with him. At the time of its release, Glen
or Glenda did only just break even though, the subject proved to
be too ahead of its time, Christine Jorgensen or no Christine Jorgensen.
It wasn't until much later that the film was picked up by lovers of the
bizarre who simply loved the film for what it was - a far-out exposé on a
still obscure subject - and saw to it that the film was released and
re-released on video, DVD, and got played time and again on TV and even in
the theatres (I personally caught my first glimpse of the film in a movie
theatre in the mid-1990's). So eventually, the film did become the cult
item it deserved to be even upon its initial release ... The
same year as Glen
or Glenda, Wood also made Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of
the Tucson Kid (1953) a half-hour pilot for a TV-series that was never
realized (according to Wood himself, Crossroad Avenger was passed
up in favour of Wild Bill Hickock starring Guy Madison). At
this point it has to be noted that Western TV-series were in the early
1950's - very unlike today - in constant demand, with popular Western
series of the day being The
Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Cisco Kid,
The Gene Autry Show and The
Roy Rogers Show,
to name but a few. So if you wanted to sell a TV-series, it'd better be a
Western ... or at least that's the theory. The downside to this theory is
of course that the market was oversaturated with Westerns back then and
that unless you had something really special on the hand, chances of
turning the pilot into a series would be slim. That's not to say that Ed
Wood's pilot was bad, it was pretty much standard TV-Western fare about the adventures of an insurance detective, and it was competently
enough done for a TV-Western of its time, it was just pretty much
run-of-the-mill fare that (unlike most other Ed Wood-films) would leave no
lasting impression. And whatever you expect, don't expect this one to be
the Plan
9 of cheap TV-Western. Crossroad Avenger
starred Tom Keene, a
veteran Western actor at the tail-end of his career who had been around
since the late 1920's (sometimes using his alias Richard Powers or George
Duryea) who was also in Wood's The Sun was Setting and would later
pop up again in Wood's Plan
9 from Outer Space (1959), incidently his last film. Supporting
Keene were another veteran Western actor, Tom Tyler [Tom
Tyler bio - click here], whose career at the time was
definitely going nowhere, who badly suffered from arthritis, who badly
needed the paycheck his involvement in Crossroad Avenger
promised,
and who died shortly after Crossroad Avenger
was finished, and the prolific B-movie villain Kenne Duncan, whom Wood had first met on
the set of The Lawless Rider and who had become a personal friend
of Wood who would show up time and again in his films.
In 1954,
Ed Wood would hook up with Alex Gordon, who was the executive producer on The Lawless Rider
and later became a producer with AIP,
and the two co-wrote Jail Bait,
a sort-of film noir. With the film noir genre, Wood felt a little
like a fish out of water: The rather gritty realism of the genre was
rather ill at ease with Wood's overboarding fantasy made up of pulp
mainstays, transvestites, and horror and sci-fi motives. The film about a
killer forcing a plastic surgeon to give him a new face only to get the
face of a man he originally framed for one of his murders still features
some gruesome details one has come to expect from Wood, but by and large
it lacks the typical over-the-top Ed Wood-quality, instead resembles the
then contemporary straight-forward cop TV-series Dragnet. The
film was decidedly shot on the cheap and in a rush - in a mere four days,
actually -, and it shows: Since Ed himself spent most of his time setting
up the camera, he had little time to give the actors any direction - which
shows especially in the stiff and insecure performance of Mister Universe
1950 and first-time-actor Steve Reeves (as a cop) [Steve
Reeves bio - click here], who was then another 4
years away from fame as Italy's first (and most famous) Hercules.
Other actors in Jail Bait
were Wood's girlfriend Dolores Fuller as the heroine, veteran actor and
Wood's personal friend Lyle Talbot (who was also in Glen
or Glenda and Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of
the Tucson Kid and would eventually pop up again in Plan
9 from Outer Space) as the inspector, and silent screen star and
later character actor Herbert Rawlinson as the plastic surgeon.
Originally, Rawlinson's role was intended for Lugosi, who had to turn it
down though due to other engangements. In a macabre footnote, Rawlinson
allegedly died the very night after his final day of shooting Jail
Bait ... How Jail
Bait was financed remained pretty much a mystery to this day -
rumours have it that Alex Gordon paid for most of it out of his own pocket
- but it was eventually picked up for distribution by small-time
distributor Howco,
which also furnished the film with its score - music by Hoyt Curtin
that was previously also used in the trash classic Mesa
of Lost Women (1953, Ron Ormond, Herbert Tevos) that made about as
little sense in that movie as in Jail
Bait (incidently, Dolores Fuller,
Lyle Talbot and Mona McKinnon from Jail
Bait all also appear in Mesa
of Lost Women - which would all suggest that Howco
was involved with the production of the film as well, but on matters like
this nothing can be said for certain).
Alex Gordon, who
co-wrote the screenplay for Jail
Bait with Wood - and with whom Ed shared an appartment back then -
also gave Ed the idea to his next feature, which would eventually turn out
to be one of Wood's most fondly remembered and most laughed at films: Bride
of the Monster (1955) !!! Bride
of the Monster was quite an ambitious project - by Ed Wood's
standards anyways - as it featured a plot that required some elaborate
sets - above all a convincing and convincingly futuristic laboratory -,
some advanced special effects - it features a man who grows into a giant
and who has a hand-on-hand fight with a giant squid -, and thus it would
need a reasonably high budget. And it would need an actor like Bela Lugosi
[Bela Lugosi bio - click here]
to play the villain. The good news first: Ed did get Bela Lugosi for the
villain/mad scientist role. The rest though was mere improvisation the
typical Ed Wood way ... but let's not get ahead and let me give you a
rundown on the story first: Bela Lugosi plays a mad scientist who hides
out in a presumably abandoned house somewhere in the swamps that is
guarded by both his strongman Lobo (Tor Johnson who
would soon become a
fixture of Ed Wood films) [Tor
Johnson bio - click here] and a giant octopus. There he conducts experiments
to create a race of giants. However, both an East European spy and a nosey
girl reporter (leading lady Loretta King) have caught up with him, and
before you know it, Bela has fed the spy to the squid and strapped the
reporter to a hospital bed to use his super-gro-rays on her to make her a
giant woman ... which is when Lobo, who has fallen in love with the lady,
decides to rebel against his master ... but when the two fight, Bela is
exposed to his own super-gro-ray, becomes a giant and kills Lobo. By that
time though, the police has already caught up with him until he ends in
the tentacles of his own giant squid ... Now this synopsis alone might
sound trashy enough, but how Ed Wood achieved it is the really fun part of
the film, actually: Ed could not afford a set desiner or even decent props
for his laboratory set, so he simply took everything that looked remotely
technical that he could find and used it as a backdrop, and instead of
having real, dungeon-like brick-walls a set like this would have called
for, Ed just used a brick-wallpaper, and not a very convincing one, too.
Even worse are the special effects though, when Bela is turned into a
giant the only thing that changes is that he is all of a sudden wearing plateau shoes,
which add a mere few inches to his height, and when Bela has to wrestle the squid, he is basically sitting in a puddle in front of a rubber
squid and tries to wrap the squids otherwise immobile tentacles around his
body, desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to make it look like a real
fight. Of course these scenes don't work at all (especially when you
compare the squid-in-the-puddle to the real-life squid footage spliced
into the film earlier on), but at the same time they are funny as hell.
Plus, one can't help but feel the boyish ambition Ed has put into this
little project, and his (erroneous?) conviction that he was making
something more than just another drive-in sci-fi-flick (and wouldn't you
know it, over the years the film has actually turned out to be something
more ...). The only thing unfunny about Bride
of the Monster is probably its comedy relief character, Kelton
the Cop, as played by Paul Marco, an inept cop who tries
himself in a bunch of (slapstick-)situations ... but even he is so unfunny
it's kind of endearing again. By the way, Kelton would also pop up in Ed
Wood's next two films, Night
of the Ghouls (1958) and Plan
9 from Outer Space (1959). (By the way, Kelton
the Cop, again played by Paul Marco, eventually made his
return in the 2005 film The Naked Monster [Wayne Berwick, Ted
Newsom].)
Shortly after finishing Bride
of the Monster, Ed Wood and his girlfriend and frequent leading
lady (though she only had a very small part in Bride
of the Monster) Dolores Fuller split up, allegedly because she -
unlike in Glen
or Glenda - could not come to terms with his crossdressing (other
sources though blame Ed's increasing alcoholism). Shortly after that,
Fuller gave up acting for good - which might be all for the better,
because on one hand she was not much of an actress, on the other hand she
was a very talented songwriter, which she eventually made her profession,
writing number one songs for several artists of the day, including several
hits for Elvis Presley himself, Nat 'King' Cole and Peggy Lee. It's
somehow ironic that she nowadays is much more famous for her involvement
with Ed Wood, which back then led to nowhere, than for her very successful
career in music.
Around the same time, Ed also broke up with his friend,
roommate and frequent collaborator, Alex Gordon, mainly because Gordon
started producing for AIP,
being a personal friend of that company's co-president Samuel Z.Arkoff,
and Wood felt betrayed because he was left out of the deal - which was
mainly because Arkoff did not have a too high opinion of Ed Wood's
talents, and perhaps rightly so. In later days, Wood would claim that
Arkoff stole the story for How
to Make a Monster (1958, Herbert L. Strock) from a script he had
submitted - which might be a blunt exaggeration given the run-or-the-mill
quality of the film's plot (meaning you don't need any kind of inspiration
to come up with a story like this). The year 1956 is marked by
a series of failures for Ed Wood: He starts filming The Vampire's Tomb
with
Bela Lugosi - as the vampire, of course -, but then Bela dies from a heart
attack - with Ed Wood allegedly being one of the last persons to have ever seen
him alive - and the project has to be abandoned (but shots of Bela as the
vampire were later incorporated into Plan
9 from Outer Space).
The death of Bela Lugosi also brought to
a definite end various other projects Ed Wood planned for/with the actor,
including Dr.Acula, a TV-series in which Bela was to have played
an investigator into the supernatural, above mentioned Doctor Voodoo,
and The Phantom Ghoul aka The Ghoul Goes West, a
horror-Western starring Lugosi, Lon Chaney jr [Lon
Chaney jr bio - click here], John Carradine, Tor Johnson
and as hero Gene Autry, and after he bailed out either Bob Steele or Ken
Maynard. Wood only planned to write and produce this film with Harold
Daniels handling the direction. The film was to have been in colour and
widescreen. Then Ed Wood tried his hands on teenage
action with Rock and Roll Hell aka Hellborn, which is another project he had to
abandon when producer George Weiss bailed out. Eventually, Weiss sold the
existing material to actor Conrad Brooks, and he and Wood reportedly tried
to finish the film for the next decade or so ... but it didn't see the
light of day (or rather the darkness of a projection room) until 1993 as
part of the anthology-film Hellborn,
but only in fragmentary form. Segments of Rock'n'Roll Hell by the way
found their way into both The
Night of the Ghouls (1958) and The
Sinister Urge (1961).
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On a friendlier note, one of Ed's scripts, Teenage Girl Gang,
was turned into a film, The Violent Years, in 1956, directed by
William Morgan and produced by Headliner
Productions. The film was an enjoyably silly and exploitative film
about a teenage girl gang that roams a small town raping (!) and
killing whoever gets in their way, it was made on a shoestring, and it
features some typical Ed Woodian dialogue, so it's definitely worth
checking out for all fans out there. Some of you might note that the plot
of this film has striking similarities to Russ Meyer's girl-gang movie Faster
Pussycat ... Kill ! Kill ! from a decade later - but in direct
comparison The Violent Years
is no match for Meyer's masterpiece.
Finally,
in late 1956, Wood starts filming his script Graverobbers from Outer
Space, which would eventually turn out to be his magnum opus, Plan
9 from Outer Space. Basically, Plan
9 from Outer Space is about a bunch of aliens arriving in UFOs who
want to take over our earth by raising the dead (actually just 3
dead, them being Vampira, Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi/Lugosi's double Tom
Mason). But as these films go, the earthlings strike back and prove to be
the better fighters in the long run ...
As with Bride
of the Monster before it, Ed Wood totally lacked perspective about
the budget needed for an elaborate science fiction film like Plan
9 from Outer Space, and once again special effects, sets and
costumes looked it. Especially the UFO-interiors are so poorly done they
are wonderful, a studio-set of a graveyard looks so unreal it almost hurts
and the idea of having an airplane cockpit represented by a mere shower curtain
is, well, daring. Add to this UFOs being impersonated by plain old
Cadillac hubcaps with a mothership that's clearly a mediocre painting,
some very bad alien outfits, effeminate Bunny Breckinridge as the alien
leader and Criswell - a popular if untalented psychic of his time -
popping out of his coffin when you least expect him to, and you have a
wonderful piece of trash that defies description. And to top it all off,
Wood incorporated scenes of Bela Lugosi [Bela
Lugosi bio - click here] shot for The Vampire's Tomb
into the film that make no sense in Plan
9 from Outer Space (after all, Bela was supposed to play a
vampire, and there is none in Plan
9), and Bela is doubled in several (linking) scenes by Tom Mason,
a man who doesn't in the least look like him but constantly hides his face
behind his cape, and you've got ... wow, you've got a film you are not
likely to ever forget !!! Of course, the film was made on the dirt-cheap,
but that didn't keep Ed Wood to run out of budget eventually, and
ultimately he came up with the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills as one of
the backers for his project - who only financed Ed's sci-fi picture on the
condition that everyone in the cast converts to their religion - which led
to a mass-baptism in a Beverly Hills swimming pool. The biggest name in Plan
9's cast - apart from Bela Lugosi of course and maybe psychic
Criswell and wrestler Tor Johnson [Tor
Johnson bio - click here] - was probably Vampira (real name Maila
Nurmi), a former stage actress, model and dancer who had an (alleged)
romance with Orson Welles and who was almost discovered for the big screen
by Howard Hawks, but who eventually rose to fame when she hosted a TV
horror show, The Vampira Show, on ABC
in 1954. After she was done with the show, she tried to embark on a
Hollywood career, which almost immediately fell on hard times ... so by
1956, she was happy to be hired even by Ed Wood. In later days though she
did not have too much good to say about the experience, and even though
she is now considered as one of Ed's core players, she actually appeared
only in Plan
9 from Outer Space. On the set of Plan
9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood met Norma McCarthy who had a small
role in the film, and he married her before shooting of the film was over
- however, their marriage would not last: Like Dolores Fuller, she
couldn't cope with Ed's crossdressing, probably even more so. It is said
that the marriage was never even consummated, and it was annulled only
days after the wedding
Plan
9 from Outer Space was previewed in 1957, but it actually took Ed until 1959 to get
distribution for the film. In the meantime though, he wasn't idle: In
1957 he directed The Final Curtain, a 20-minute pilot for a
projected horror anthology series to be called Portraits in Terror,
but as with The Adventures of Tucson Kid, this series never came
into being. Actually, the lead in The Final Curtain
was intended
for Bela Lugosi, who was reading the script on his deathbed, but with Lugosi
gone, the role was eventually handed over to Duke Moore. About another horror
short Wood made in 1957, The Night the Banshee Cried, next to
nothing is known. Also in 1957, Ed married Kathleen O'Hara Everett, who
finally was a woman who could keep up with his crossdressing, his
depressions and his drinking habit (which got worse and worse over the
years), and who would remain by his side until his death in 1978, which
meant living through many a hard time ...
In 1958, Ed directed his next feature film, The
Night of the Ghouls, a weird horror story about a phony
spiritualist (Kenne Duncan) who uses all sorts of tricks and special
effects to stage seances in order to extort money from his invariably rich
clients. In the end though, he accidently raises the dead (the real dead)
- which even he didn't know he could do -, who have their vengeance on
him. Duke Moore plays the good guy, a cop, in this one, Tor Johnson [Tor
Johnson bio - click here] once
more plays a monstruous strongman called Lobo, sweet young Valda Hansen is
doing a Vampira impression, while veteran actor Johnny Carpenter plays the
chief of police. And of course, Criswell is popping out of his coffin once again,
while Paul Marco does his (inevitable) Kelton
the Cop-routine. By fans, The
Night of the Ghouls is generally not held in as high regard as Glen
or Glenda, Bride
of the Monster or Plan
9 from Outer Space, maybe becasue it lacked a big name like Bela
Lugosi, maybe because it's more competently made and above all lacks
all-too-obvious technical glitches, or maybe because its story is not
quite as over-the-top. Still, taken by its own merits, The
Night of the Ghouls - by the way the only feature produced by Ed's
own short-lived production company Atomic
Productions - is great fun, a film chock-full of overused horror
clichés like black and white ghosts, the dead rising from their tombs,
seances, skeletons sitting by the table, ... you name it, it's there. Of
course, if you are a serious horror fan, this film will mean nothing to
you, maybe even offend you, but if you take it with a grain of salt, it's
nothing short of a laugh riot - and this time around you are not even sure
if you're laughing at the film or with it.
Also in 1958, one of
Ed Wood's screenplay, The
Bride and the Beast, was brought to the screen under the direction
of Adrian Weiss. The film was produced by Allied
Artists, the sister/successor company of Monogram,
which was still a small player even during its heyday in the 1950's - but
it was definitely the biggest company Ed Wood was ever associated with
during his lifetime ... As a result, the budget for the film was higher
and thus the movie has a more polished look than the usual Ed Wood output:
The stock footage used at least makes sense within the proceedings of the
film, and the film even features two real life tigers who are allowed to
interact with the actors (or rather their stuntmen, most probably). The
plot of The Bride
and the Beast is pure Ed Wood though, it's about a woman, Carlotta
Austin, who feels strangely drawn to the ape of her big game hunter
husband Lance Fuller, and vice versa. Under hypnosis, she is regressed to
a former life and it turns out that she once was ... an ape. Hubby then
is stupid enough to take his newly-wed wife to Africa on a honeymoon, and
while he is out to chase two tigers who have been imported from India and
escaped upon arrival, the good wife is reclaimed by the gorillas. Add to
this some typically inane dialogue as only good old Ed Wood could write
it and an angora sweater ... and welcome to Ed Wood-land !!! Of course,
it should be noted that Ron Ormond's Untamed
Mistress (1956), a film with a very similar story, beats The
Bride and the Beast by a length or two considering sheer
outrageousness. (Interesting trivia: The assistant director on The
Bride and the Beast is veteran director Harry L. Fraser, on whose
serial Jungle Menace [1937, Harry L. Fraser, George Melford] The
Bride and the Beast's director Adrian Weiss served as a assistant
director.)
The remainder of the 1950's proved nothing but bad
luck for Ed Wood, he tried to launch several projects, but to no avail.
Actually, Ed did not make another film until The
Sinister Urge in 1961. The
Sinister Urge tires hard to be a hard-hitting exposé of the smut
racket (basically meaning nude photographers) and its influence on crime,
namely rape, but somehow, while the conclusions this film comes to are
quite outrageous, the film is little more than a third-rate crime picture
that tries to be exploitative but comes off as boring more than anything
else, despite its sensationalist concept and a (for the time) rather
explicit rape sequence, which Ed filmed after the film had already been
released in some areas to at least spice up the proceedings a little. The whole
thing probably was just too straight forward for Wood's obvious
predilection for pulp fiction (and especially sci-fi and horror) to really
put his soul into it, and so despite a crossdressing cop and characters
endlessly rambling on about things only loosely connected to the on-screen
goings-on (one of Ed Wood's trademarks), the film is flat to the point of
being unremarkable, in Ed Wood's filmography as in the history of
(s)exploitation cinema as such.
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In 1962, Ed Wood worked as a
script doctor (which in itself sounds like a laugh or a contradiction in
terms) on Married too
Young (George Moskov) for Headliner
Productions - the company that also produced The
Sinister Urge -, but by and large, Ed's film career was over by
the early 1960's, several projects he had during that time simply did not
come into being, including Ghouls of the Moon, a sort-of sequel to Plan
9 from Outer Space which was to utilize yet more unused Bela
Lugosi footage, The Peeper, a sequel to The
Sinister Urge, and Attack of the Giant Salami, a science
fiction spoof that was to star veteran comedian Joe E.Brown, horror icon
Boris Karloff, and Valda Hansen from The
Night of the Ghouls. Ultimately, the disappointing
Sinister Urge would remain Ed's only directing effort during the
whole 1960's.
In 1963, Ed, first out of necessity rather than out of
conviction, started writing pulp novels, invariably from the sleazy side
of the genre, but soon enough he proved himself to be a prolific and
proficient author for hire and he developed quite a talent for it (as well
as being an ace on the typewriter). Also,
his novels, even though they were almost invariably cheap sex-and-crime
novels (in fact the very stuff that is condemned in The
Sinister Urge), showed a certain personal touch: they were often
about transvestites, (fear of) homosexuality - Ed was never a homosexual,
but when you are crossdressing this topic comes up almost automatically -
and of course angora sweaters, and the stories were often flavoured with a
touch of horror or the macabre. Some of the racier titles of the books
he wrote were Black Lace Drag aka Killer in Drag, its sequel
Death of a Transvestite, Parisian Passions, Side-Show
Siren, Drag Trade, Devil Girls, It Takes One to Know
One, Suburbia Confidential, Night Time Lez, Raped in
the Grass, The Perverts, Sex, Shrouds and Caskets, The
Sexecutives, The Love of the Dead, Young, Black and Gay,
Purple Thighs, To Make a Homo, Forced Entry and Death
of a Transvestite Hooker. Occasionally Ed also wrote non-fiction books,
which were only rarely less sleazy than his fiction books though, and the
titles are telling: Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History, Sex Museum,
A Study of the Sons and Daughters of Erotica, Sexual Practices
in Witchcraft and Black Magic, A Study of Fetishes and Fantasies,
and A Study in the Motivation of Censorship, Sex and the Movies.
Also
in 1963, Boris Petroff produced and directed a film based on a script by
Ed Wood, Shotgun Wedding, a
backwoods drama set in the Ozarks,
however this film is only mildly entertaining and by now largely forgotten. In 1965 though, Ed Wood
was involved with another movie that would eventually gain cult status: Orgy
of the Dead, directed by A.C.Stephen (aka Stephen C.Apostolof), was
not only based on a screenplay by Ed Wood, he also served as assistant
director. Essentially, the film was little more than a series of strippers
doing their routines in a macabre graveyard set, with the rest of the film
is filled up with a story about the Emperor of the Dead (Criswell, once
more) and two mortals who accidently witness the strippers, who are
supposed to be undead, stripping. It all makes very little sense, and at
least from today's point of view the whole thing is very tame (the
striptease I mean) and unexciting, but some of the strippers' cheap
costumes, an unconvincing wolfman and unconvincing mummy and typical Ed
Wood-dialogue make this worth your while nevertheless.
For the
remainder of his career, Ed Wood, who wanted to be a serious Western-,
sci-fi- or horror-director, would never be able to rise above smut level,
as even the titles of most of the films he scripted prove, for example For
Love and Money (1967, Donald A.Davis), which was based on his novel Sexecutives,
Operation Redlight (1969, Don Doyle), based on his novel Mama's
Diary.
There are two films from the late 1960's however
that deserve special mention: The first is Ed's sexy caveman spoof One
Million AC/DC (1969, Ed De Priest), which takes an ironic look at
genre cinema like One
Million Years B.C. (1965, Don Chaffey) and, despite being little
more than a feeble excuse to show naked women, is at times actually quite
funny.
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The second film worth mentioning is Love
Feast/Pretty
Models... all in a Row/The Photographer
(1969, Joseph F. Robertson), which was not only
written by Wood, but in this one he also plays the lead role, a
photographer who has invited a seemingly endless string of models to his
house to shag, but eventually the models turn the tables on him and force
him to submit to their fetishistic fantasies, which include wearing
women's shoes and a babydoll nightie - nothing good old Ed Wood wasn't all
too familiar with, actually ... thing is, old Ed looks miserable in the
film, his face visibly scarred by chronic alcoholism, his body in poor
shape, and when he's made to wear women's cloths, it looks nothing short
of pathetic - but in an odd way, the sorry state Wood is in totally fits
his role, that of a pathetic sleazeball. The girls in this are all pretty hot though and all get naked
...
In 1970 finally, Ed Wood was allowed back into the
directing chair - but much has changed in the B-movie world since he had
directed his last film: The sexual revolution has taken place for better
or worse, with the
result that small-frye producers now believed the big buck was in sex
cinema, and hardcore pornography had been born ... and thus Ed's last
films, Take it Out in Trade (1970), Necromania
(1971) - featuring Rene Bond and Rick Lutze) -, The Only House
(1971) - featuring Uschi Digard -, and Nympho Cycler (1971) were all sexploitation from the sleazy
end of even this genre, with at least Necromania
existing in both softcore and hardcore versions, while The
Young Marrieds (1972) - his last feature film as writer/director -
goes all-out hardcore. And while these films
are odd sure enough, they just lack the sheer outrageousness of Ed Wood's
output from the 1950's.
Eventually Ed gave up directing feature
films, but he kept on directing, even if it was now hardcore loops for the
Swedish Erotica-series and a series of sex-shorts called Sex
Education Corespondence School (1975), which were sold as a
package with sex ecudation books.
Still, during the 1970's,
producer/director A.C.Stephens of Orgy of the Dead-fame repeatedly
requested his services for scripting cheap and cheesy sex-films, often
starring Rene Bond. These films include Drop-Out Wife, Class
Reunion, and The Snow Bunnies (all 1972, A.C.Stephen), The
Cocktail Hostesses (1973, A.C.Stephen), Five Loose Women/Fugitive
Girls (1974,
A.C.Stephen) - on which Wood also served as assistant director and had a
small role -, The Beach Bunnies (1976, A.C.Stephen) and Hot Ice
(1978, A.C.Stephen) - which again had Ed as assistant director and actor. Still,
life hasn't been kind to Wood, during the 1970's he and his wife ran into
continuous financial problems, Ed's alcoholism worsened, his depressions
became more frequent, and it didn't help one bit that he and Kathy were
evicted from apartment after apartment, and were often allowed to take
with them only the things they could carry (if even) ... but during that
time Ed never gave up the idea to one day (again) become a respected film
director, and from the early 1960's onwards he had worked on a script that
against all odds could have achieved just that and finetuned it numerous
times: I Awoke Early the Day I Died, a tongue-in-cheek film
without dialogue (admittedly never Wood's forte) about a madman escaping
an asylum in women's cloths who then roams town encountering one macabre
situation after the next until he falls into an open grave and breaks his
neck - but unfortunately, during Ed's lifetime the film never came into
being.
Ed Wood died 1978 a poor man in the apartment of his
friend, actor Peter Coe, where he and wife Kathy were living at the time
after just having been evicted for the umpteenth time. What made his
death all the more tragic was that his rediscovery was just around the
corner: In 1980, Michael and Harry Medved celebrated Wood's Plan
9 from Outer Space as the worst movie of all time, with
Wood also winning worst director, in their highly questionable book The
Golden Turkey Awards. Fortunately though, this tendentious publication
did not condemn Ed Wood's films to instant oblivion but on the
contrary sparked new interest in his output, and all of a sudden his films
were available again, first on film festivals and in theatres, then on
home video which had an early boom in the early to mid-1980's, with
distributors always looking for more stuff to release on the public (which
was repeated in the late 1990's/early 2000's when DVD was taking over).
And unlike during his lifetime, interest in the man has not vaned after
his death - which eventually led to the definitive book on Ed Wood, Nightmare of
Ecstasy - The Life and Art of Edward D.Wood jr
by Rudolph Grey being published in 1992, and in 1994 his life (or rather the part of his
life that concerned his association with Bela Lugosi) was turned into a
big budget movie, Ed Wood, by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp
as Ed Wood. And wouldn't you know it, the film actually won 2 Oscars
- for best supporting role (Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi) and best make-up
... and who would have thought during his lifetime that Ed Wood would ever
be associated with the Academy Awards ?
Additional to
that, both Glen
or Glenda and Plan
9 from Outer Space were remade as porn flicks by Caballero,
titled Glen & Glenda (1994, Frank Marino) and Plan 69 from
Outer Space (1993, Frank Marino), respectively. Also, Wood's
unfinished Rock'n'Roll Hell was finally made available (in
fragments) as part of the film Hellborn (Ed Wood, Henry Bederski)
in 1994, and in 1995, Wood's very first Crossroads
of Laredo was finally released, albeit in less than perfect form.
But
the real triumph for Ed Wood came in 1998, when his ambitious script I
Awoke Early the Day I Died was made into a film, I Woke Up Early
the Day I Died (Aris Iliopulos) which starred Billy Zane, who also
took production into his own hands - and the film, both paying loving
hommage to Ed Wood and showing the potential of his favourite script, is
really good, bizarre maybe, but good nevertheless. (By the way, another
adaptation of the script, the short I
Awoke Early the Day I Died, was filmed in 1997 by director David
Tahir, but with less appealling results.)
Further projects to
which Ed Wood's name is attached are Devil Girls (1999, Andre
Perkowski), an underground film based on Wood's novel of the same name, The
Vampire's Tomb (also 1999, Andre Perkowski [Andre
Perkowski inverview - click here]), based on his unfilmed
screenplay intended for Lugosi, and The Interplanetary Surplus Male and Amazon Women of Outer Space
(2003, Sam Firstenberg), which is said to include material from Amazon
Women of Outer Space, an abandoned film Wood has supposedly started to
shoot in the 1950's - though I have yet to find a confirmation that
Wood ever directed the material in the first place ... All of
this gives you a perspective of how alive Ed Wood is even nowadays,
almost 30 years after his death, how cherished he is, and not only by bad
movie afficionados, and how much of a household name he has become while better
directors (meaning better craftsmen) have long vaned into obscurity ...
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