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If the life of filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., were fiction, set down more or less as Wood’s cronies tell it, it would be hailed as the great Hollywood satire. It would seem like a creation of Nathaniel West, had he survived until the Fifties, or of Tom Robbins, had he been writing then. But Wood’s outrageous story, though it has undoubtedly been embroidered in the years since his death and subsequent status as a minor Tinseltown legend, is a true one–he actually led that chaotic, frustrated, obsessed, shabbily surreal life.
For this reason alone, even if Tim Burton’s Ed Wood hadn’t been a good movie, I’d have been tickled pink as angora that it was made at all. There’s something splendid about the idea of a high-profile, critically lauded, prodigiously gifted director like Burton choosing to spend his clout, money, time and talent making a bio-pic of Wood, a director who never was any of the above and never possessed any of the above.
What Wood did have, along with a heavy fetish and an almost delusional confidence in his own potential, was an intense passion for cinema as a medium of personal expression. This is what sets him apart from the other makers of grade-Z exploitation films of his time (and now), and this is what Burton and Johnny Depp, who plays the title role, respond to in their subject.
As some of the above might suggest, I can pretend to little objectivity on the subject of Wood, since I’m a longtime fan. His Plan 9 from Outer Space has, for no critically defensible reason, been among my favorite movies since I first saw it on late-night TV in the late Seventies. With a touch of haughtiness, I must boast that I discovered Wood’s movies all by myself, without help from fanzines or the snide “tributes” of Michael and Harry Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards.
But with all the distance I can manage, I really think that Ed Wood is both one of the funniest movies of the year and a surprisingly convincing, non-campy chronicle of the man’s life and times. Shot in glorious black-and-white by Stefan Czapsky (of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line), Burton’s unabashedly affectionate, ironically sentimental film traces the “salad years” of Wood’s career–from 1953, when he made his notorious debut feature Glen or Glenda, until 1959, and the opening of Plan 9 from Outer Space, his magnum opus. For the uninitiated, Edward D. Wood, Jr., was a nice fellow from Poughkeepsie, New York, a decorated combat veteran of the South Pacific in World War II, who had two great obsessions in life–one was to write and direct movies, and the other was to wear women’s clothing, especially angora (he claimed to have hit the beach during the invasion of Tarawa with a pink bra and panties under his Marine uniform). After the war he found his way to Hollywood.
After years of laboring at studio odd jobs and failing as a playwright, Wood at last talked his way into a directing job on an exploitation film inspired by the Christine Jorgensen case. In Wood’s hands the film, Glen or Glenda (or I Changed My Sex), lost track of most of its sex-change theme and became, principally, an “expressionistic” paean to the joys and tribulations of cross-dressing, a subject much dearer to Wood’s enthusiastically male and heterosexual (but angora-loving) heart.
Glen or Glenda featured an appearance by the great horror star Bela Lugosi (as a sort of godlike chorus figure), with whom Wood became close friends. Lugosi was on his last legs by the time he and Wood met–forgotten by Hollywood, impoverished and emaciated by morphine addiction, alcoholism, and endless road tours of the stage version of Dracula. But the old campaigner was eager and worked cheap, and his name still had value. He starred in another Wood film, a horror yarn called Bride of the Monster (1955).
Wood worked independently, raising pittances from backers–a meat-packer put up the money for Bride of the Monster, on condition that his son play the romantic lead–as well as the loyal members of his repertory company. At times his business gimmicks were unsavory–he built the plot of Plan 9 around a few minutes of silent footage he had shot of Lugosi shortly before the actor’s death, and then gave him star billing in the advertising (a double, face hidden but nearly a foot taller, filled in for Lugosi in the late actor’s subsequent scene).
Wood’s tale becomes less funny after Plan 9, where Burton wisely ends his account. He made another horror film or two and a couple of “nudie” troubled-youth melodramas. Then, throughout the Sixties and Seventies, he eked out a subsistence for himself and his wife by writing dozens of porno novels, and scripting, directing, and occasionally acting in low-grade skinflicks and industrials.
By 1978, alcoholism and extreme poverty had made Wood an old man at 54, and he died, penniless and evicted, at the home of the familiar character actor Peter Coe, his drinking buddy. That same month New York’s Thalia theater began regular midnight shows of Glen or Glenda, and interest in the director by buffs of marginal film began to develop. Wood missed his own Renaissance by a hair.
The source credited in Ed Wood for Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s screenplay is Rudolph Grey’s 1992 book Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, a deadpan, unmocking work that is probably the best Hollywood biography I’ve ever read. Alexander and Karaszewski pack as much Wood lore, and as many of Wood’s oddball pals, into their script as they can, but they focus on the touching friendship between the has-been Lugosi and the has-been-to-be Wood.
Though there is much good acting in the film (Bill Murray has a fine, dry turn as Wood’s friend, the would-be transsexual John “Bunny” Breckinridge) it is in the scenes between Depp and Martin Landau as Lugosi that the film commands the attention even of non-buffs. Depp looks like a pretty-boy, but he’s shown repeatedly, from Edward Scissorhands to Benny & Joon, that’s he’s a unique comic and pantomimic talent.
Wood is the meatiest part Depp’s had in awhile. He plays the director broadly, in a parody of the brassy acting style of the Fifties, as a perpetual ecstatic, exploding with mad, unwarranted optimism. His transporting rapture at being in the compnay of his beloved Bela is sweetly hysterical, and he’s blissfully un-self-concious in the drag scenes, which are played for laughs but not milked–there’s a sense of laughing with Wood rather than at him. As for Landau, he may never have been better, and he certainly has never been more likable, than he is as Lugosi. His vocal impersonation is flawless, and even under Rick Baker’s startlingly accurate make-up he makes the old trouper a real and likable guy, not a waxwork. I’ve not been a great fan of Landau in the past, but any actor who can play Bela Lugosi and not give us a caricature deserves, I’d say, to be called consummate.
The film’s funniest moments are those in which we hear Lugosi speak mundane remarks in that unmistakable voice. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he wearily mutters at the prospect of wading into a cold pond for the sake of a scene, and it’s suddenly clear that the lives of icons have to be led by ordinary human beings.
Unlike Wood, Lugosi truly was a great talent–his acting techniques were brilliant, just antiquated, belonging more to the 19th-Century stage than to the movies. Landau makes us feel the pain of Lugosi’s obsolescence in life. When Lugosi roars obscenities at the mention of his old rival Boris Karloff (whose more realistic and versatile style gave him a richer career than Lugosi) it isn’t pathetic–it’s blisteringly funny, and it’s also rather marvelous that this sick, wasted old man still has his actor’s vanity. Thanks to Landau, Ed Wood amounts to a long-belated tribute to the star, and he deserves it. But does Wood, the central character, deserve all this attention? It is worth remebering that Wood’s work, even by the most lenient artistic standards, was awful. To make the case for Wood as a filmmaker of any importance at all would be foolishly quixotic. And to tell his life story only to mock an eccentric incompetent would be both cruel and a waste of time. Burton, however, does neither. He grasps what makes it possible to enjoy, even cherish, Wood’s films–the tension betwen their maker’s intense need to express himself through cinema and his complete lack of talent. This was manifested most amusingly in his dialogue. Straining for eloquence, Wood achieved a weird syntactical dissonance that could almost be called lyrical. Wood was not, in spite of the posthumous sneer from the Medveds, the worst movie director in history (anyone sees alot of low-rent horror pictures knows that there were and are plenty of worse filmmakers). He was something more unique, and more honorable–the cinema’s most passionately inept real artist. It is from this that Wood’s films derive both their comicality and their poignance, and it is this to which Burton tunes in.
No doubt, Burton gives a Capraesque sugarcoating to his hero, and to the squalid lower depths of Hollywood in which he labored. Ed Wood the movie completes Wood as an artist–Wood supplies the vision, Burton the talent. Maybe Wood’s spirit can rest easier in the knowledge that, by living his life rather than by plying his craft, he finally made a good movie.
BOX INFO:Ed Wood. Directed by Tim Burton; with Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Vincent D’Onofrio, G. D. Spradlin, Max Casella, George “The Animal” Steele, Lisa Marie. Rated R. /30/
Ed Wood–Director Tim Burton completes the artistic vision of the cinema’s legendary incompetent with this unabashedly affectionate, sentimental, and deeply funny bio-pic of the Fifties-era cult director, angora fetishist and final colloborator of the great horror star Bela Lugosi. In the title role, Johnny Depp finds Wood’s rapturous, optimistic heart, and Martin Landau proves himself a consummate actor by playing Lugosi without caricature. Also with Bill Murray in a fine, dry turn as Wood’s crony John “Bunny” Breckinridge, Jeffrey Jones as Criswell, and Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Vincent D’Onofrio, G. D. Spradlin, Max Casella, George “The Animal” Steele, and Lisa Marie. The glorious cinematography is by Stefan Czapsky, the music is by Howard Shore.
