14 DAY TRIAL // Some might say "one who loves cinema must love Peter Jackson". And someone else might add "you must love Steven Spielberg if you love cinema". The thing is both assertions are wrong. One who loves cinema must love Ed Wood. Yes, the infamous cross-dressing director responsible for some of the worst movies of all time. How dare I say such things? Well, Ed Wood is one of the few people who really struggled for (his) cinema. The prototype of the dreamer. The one who really believed in cinema and ended up all alcoholic and messed up.
Edward D. Wood Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. He started his love affair with cinema in his childhood, when he would salvage B-movies presentation photos from the trashcans behind movie theatres. At 17 he got his first movie camera. And ever since all he ever wanted to do was shoot movies. And so he did. After his 1948 debut (The Streets of Laredo) he kept on making bad movies until the year he died (1981). 35 titles, raging from all time famous zombies-vampires-aliens sci-fi Plan 9 from Outer Space to the infamous and until recently lost porno and horror joint, Necromania.
The really interesting side of Ed Wood and his movies is the avant-garde he unaware took part in. "Camp" was invented to describe very badly written and directed movies like his; his transgressive Glen or Glenda movie about one man who likes to dress in women's clothes had a message of acceptance and tolerance for those sexually different much ahead of its time (1953); his too much, over the top monster movies that gave away any logic and coherence are to be (re-)considered among the so popular nowadays horror parodies.
Also, so much very interesting were the people he teamed up with for making his movies: from the brute-looking rather retarded yet warm hearted wrestler TOR Johnson to the TV dark diva Vampira and from the decaying cult star and forever legendary Bela Lugosi to the make up and lipstick wearing John "Bunny" Breckenridge and spaced out future teller Criswell.
One of my favorite things about Plan 9 is the appearance of Bunny Breckenridge, who was a drag queen who performed in stage revues in Paris. I think that Ed Wood hoped that Bunny would get the sex change operation that he was always planning and Ed could finally make the sex change movie that he had wanted Glen or Glenda to be.
Criswell was a regular in the Wood entourage. Here is a nice addition by way of Bennett Kobb who found the accompanying image and material in Criswell Predicts! His movies that started as sci-fi and continued as detective stories from the vaguely mystical noir pulp books of the decade just to end as horror movies are, up to this day, very nice viewing material.
A real patriot and American, Ed Wood enlisted in the Marines at age 17, just months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He became a war hero. He claimed that he had participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal while secretly wearing a brassiere and panties beneath his uniform.
His interest (or let's just say fetish) in women's clothing was not only hidden. As soon as returning to America, fascinated by the exotic and the bizarre, Ed joined a carnival. The war had left him without some teeth and with scars on one leg. His several missing teeth and disfigured leg combined with his personal fetishes and acting skills made him a perfect candidate for the freakshow. Ed played, among other roles, 'the geek' and the bearded lady.
His show as the bearded-lady got him to experience various not-quite-enjoyable body stunts: he completed the illusion of really being a female by creating his own prosthetic breasts. This was achieved (allegedly) by piercing the nipple and inflating the breast skin with air. This experience resulted in a respect for carnival freakshows and a reinforced adoration of the bizarre. Carnivals appear in Ed's late pulp novels and in some of his movies. But the most obvious dependency on the Carnival freakshow is to be found in his (semi-autobiographically) novel Killer in Drag.
As explained on a fansite: "His movies have a rushed quality to them, usually because Wood and his crew were working on a tight schedule due to funding constraints. While most directors film only one scene per day (or just a fraction of one in more modern pictures), Wood would complete up to thirty. He seldom ordered a single re-take, even if the original was obviously flawed."
