|
|
Ed Wood (1924 - 1978)
Edward Davis Wood, Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York on 10 October. His mother Lillian dressed him as a girl through much of his early childhood, and for the rest of his life Ed felt most comfortable when wearing female clothing. At the age of five, he became enthralled with the magic of movies, rushing to the local movie theater to watch serial westerns as well as the first runs of the now classic Universal monster flicks, especially those starring his idol, Bela Lugosi. For his eleventh birthday he received a home movie camera and began making his first movies with the neighborhood kids. Enlisting in the Marines in May of 1942, Ed spent his tour of duty in the Pacific, wearing women's underwear under his uniform. His teeth were knocked when he was hit with a rifle butt while fighting with a Japanese soldier and he was shot in the leg several times during different offensives. While recuperating from his wounds, Wood learned to type, developing an incredible speed and accuracy level. Returning to the States, he eventually settled in Hollywood where he was briefly married to Norma McCarthy. The marriage ended when Norma discovered Ed's cross dressing practices. By 1948, Wood had met John Crawford Thomas, a young actor who used his parent's considerable money to indulge his dreams of Hollywood stardom. Using Thomas' money, Wood produced and directed his first film, a western entitled Streets of Laredo. Only twenty silent minutes were completed before Thomas' money supply was cut off by his parents, after which Wood ended his relationship with Thomas. One of the cast members, Duke Moore, remained friends with Wood, as did cameraman Ray Flin. Both would work in almost all of Wood's movies during the 50s and 60s. Within the next few years, Ed would meet and befriend many more denizens of Tinsel Town, either unknowns who hoped to make a break into movies or faded stars who hoped to recapture their lost glory. In 1948 Ed produced his first stage play, "The Casual Company," which was both a critical and financial failure. Among its cast members was Conrad Brooks, who met Wood in a local coffee shop. Another was Dolores Fuller, who first appeared as an extra at the age of ten in It Happened One Night and had since garnered a career playing uncredited bit parts in numerous films. Through Dolores' contacts, Ed was able to finagle his way into his first director's job, a 1951 television play entitled The Sun Was Setting. In time Ed and Dolores fell in love and were engaged to be married. When word came out that a small production company planned to make a documentary film based on the recent sex change of Christine Jorgenson, tentatively titled I Changed My Sex, Wood convinced the studio to instead produce his own screenplay, written with the working titles The Transvestite; He or She; and I Led Two Lives, and finally completed as Glen or Glenda?, starring Wood in the title role and co-starring Dolores Fuller. Wood had recently befriended Bela Lugosi, by now broke and considered unemployable by most studios because of his morphine addiction. Wood, eager to help his friend and idol, directed Lugosi in a prologue sequence to Glen or Glenda in which the aged star portrayed Fate and delivered the improvised line, "Pull the string!," while stock footage of stampeding buffalo was superimposed onto Lugosi's image. The exact relevance of this scene to the movie itself, a semi autobiographical account of a man's struggle to come out to his fiancee as a cross dresser, is debated by fans of Wood to this day. Perhaps he simply felt sorry for Bela and added in the scene to help his friend relive some of his cherished memories of the Universal lots. Lugosi at first refused to do the movie because of its subject matter, but finally relented because he was desperate for money. Glen or Glenda, like all of Ed Wood's films was a box office failure and skewered by critics, both for its subject matter and its amateurish production. Yet Glen or Glenda was a pivotal film in that it presented the first sympathetic look at the plight of male transvestites. Wood's own performance is at times unintentionally hilarious while at others poignant, as when Glen speaks candidly to his fiancee Barbara (played by Ed's own fiancee, Dolores) about his cross dressing desires. In the final scene, as Barbara strips off her angora sweater and hands it to Glen, one gets some idea of the emotion Ed was trying to convey, but still can't help but giggle at the sheer camp which actually comes through. The same year that he directed Glen or Glenda, Wood also directed a western, The Lawless Rider, and Crossroads Avenger, an unsold pilot for a television series, The Tucson Kid, about an insurance investigator in the Old West. Former western serial stars Johnny Carpenter, Tom Keene, Tom Tyler, and Kenne Duncan starred in these efforts. Wood next moved into the realm of the "tough girls gone bad" genre of exploitation flicks, directing and co-producing the film Jail Bait, a rush job which circumvented SAG restrictions and was largely noteworthy for featuring a then unknown Steve Reeves. He also scripted The Violent Years, another film in the same vein as Jail Bait. Wood received little or no money from these films, and all the financial backers in Hollywood by now knew Wood's name and avoided him and his projects. Undaunted, Wood began courting people outside the business, using Bela Lugosi's name as the selling point for investment in his next venture, this time into the realm of horror films. In time, he found a major investor in the person of meat plant owner Donald McCoy, who agreed to finance Wood's picture if he cast McCoy's son Tony in the lead and included an atom bomb explosion at the end of the picture. The result was 1955's Bride of the Monster (aka "Bride of the Atom"), with Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Eric Vornoff, trying to create a race of supermen, assisted by professional wrestler Tor Johnson as Lobo. McCoy woodenly (no pun intended) played the young hero, while Loretta King played the heroine, a part originally written for Dolores, who was relegated to a small part in the movie. While this may have caused some resentment on Dolores' part, it was not, as Tim Burton's 1994 film about Wood implies, the catalyst for the end of Dolores' and Ed's relationship. The end of their union came as Ed, increasingly frustrated and depressed over his failure to find success as a director, began seeking solace in a bottle. With its cardboard sets, bad acting, and inane script, Bride of the Monster proved to be an exercise in hilarity, topped off by the climatic scene in which an obviously papier mache boulder rolls over Lugosi, knocking him into the tentacles of his pet giant octopus, whose tentacles Lugosi had to pull around himself because the electric motor for the creature had been forgotten. Lightning strikes Lugosi and his pet, causing both to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud. Perhaps because it was so entertainingly bad, Bride of the Monster enjoyed a surprisingly long run on the drive-in circuit and became the first of Wood's movies to actually make money. Yet the film was actually almost never released because Wood could not afford to pay the processing lab's fees. Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, a friend of Wood's co-writer Alex Gordon, stepped and paid the bill. Arkoff again had to step when it was discovered that Wood had oversold shares in the film, and could not pay off all the backers. Wood's next planned film was tentatively titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space, and was to once again star Bela Lugosi, this time in a caper about aliens plotting to conquer Earth with an army of resurrected corpses. Two months before filming was to start, Lugosi died. Wood had lost his star, and once again could not find backers for his project. He had by now ended his relationship with Dolores Fuller and married his second wife, Kathy. The couple moved into an apartment building whose landlord, Edward Reynolds, was an elder in the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills. Hearing that his landlord had acquired the rights to do a film about evangelist Billy Sunday but lacked sufficient funds to produce, Wood suggested that Reynolds back Grave Robbers From Outer Space and use the profits to back his own film about Billy Sunday. Reynolds agreed, but only on certain conditions, the first being that the title be changed to remove the words, "Grave Robbers." He also requested that Wood and other members of the cast and crew be baptized, believing that doing so would help Wood overcome his alcoholism. Wood agreed to the terms. Renamed, Plan 9 From Outer Space, the picture went into production using footage of Bela Lugosi shot just before his death, with additional scenes featuring Wood's chiropractor standing in for Lugosi with a cape drawn over his face. Also in the cast were Tor Johnson and Paul Marco, reprising his role of "Kelton the Cop" from Bride of the Monster. Marco introduced Wood to his friends, celebrity psychic Criswell, who agreed to provide narration, and the flamboyant John "Bunny" Breckenridge, who had previous experience on the Shakespearean stage and was cast as the alien leader. A later addition to the cast was Vampira (Maila Nurmi), the Finnish-born horror movie host, whose show had recently been canceled amid rumors that she had placed a death curse on former boyfriend James Dean. Plan 9 was completed in 1956, and included a cemetery with cardboard tombstones, paper plates painted silver and hung on strings serving as flying saucers, and the now typical Wood dialogue, "The flying saucers are up there, the graveyard's out there, but I'll be in there." Reynolds, unfortunately, could not find a distributor for the film, and as the Woods were now proving to be noisy, troublesome, and late paying tenants, he evicted them. Wood eventually sold the rights to Plan 9 for a dollar, and the film was finally released in 1959. Like Bride, it became a popular fixture on the drive-in circuit, but Wood never saw a penny from the movie. In 1957 Ed Wood wrote and directed two short films, Final Curtain and The Night the Banshee Cried. The following year, Wood wrote the script for The Bride and the Beast, an Adrian Weiss picture about a woman who learns that she was a gorilla in a previous life. Finally, in 1959, Wood convinced a real estate investor to finance his next major film, Night of the Ghouls, in which the spirits of the dead take vengeance on a fake medium, named Dr. Acula in honor of Bela Lugosi. Criswell once more did the narration, while Paul Marco made his third appearance as Kelton and Tor Johnson returned as Lobo. Once again, financial troubles got the better of Wood's directorial ambitions. When he couldn't pay the processing lab's fees, Night of the Ghouls disappeared until the 1980s, when a fan finally paid the bill and released the film on video. Wood's next film, The Sinister Urge, a woefully outdated sexploitation piece posing as a morality play about young women who find their lives ruined after posing for cheesecake photos, was released and promptly disappeared in 1961. The rest of Ed Wood's life was occupied with low-grade pornography, something he considered beneath his talents but which seemed the only way he could keep the rent paid and the alcohol he had become dependent on flowing. He wrote seventy-eight pornographic novels over fourteen years, including Death of a Transvestite and Killer in Drag. He also wrote and directed numerous softcore and eventually hardcore pornographic movies over the next sixteen years, including Necromania, The Last House, and One Million AC/DC, using such varied pseudonyms as Daniel Davis, Edward Davis, Don Miller, Akdon Telmig, and Akdov Telmig. One, Orgy of the Damned (1965), included Criswell in the cast as the Devil, overseeing a revelry of monsters. Criswell and others among Wood's friends continued to help him out during these years, with cash handouts and meals. Wood meanwhile continued to go through a string of evictions, and to sink deeper and deeper into despair, depression, and alcoholism. Finally on 10 December in 1978, Ed Wood died penniless from alcohol related heart failure in the North Hollywood apartment of a friend, nine days after he had been evicted from his own residence. Because he had a lifetime fear of being buried, Ed was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. Just two years after Ed Wood's death, Plan 9 From Outer Space was featured by the Medved brothers (before Michael developed his loony tune theories about Hollywood's alleged plot to destroy American morality) in their book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. In 1981, It Came From Hollywood, a psuedo-documentary which spoofed science fiction and horror films of the previous decades, devoted an entire section to Ed Wood and his films, narrated by Dan Aykroyd. Fellow Saturday Night Live alumnus Laraine Newman also included Wood's films in her own short-lived television series, The Canned Film Festival. By the mid 1980s, Ed Wood and his movies were attracting a cult following that no one could have imagined thirty years earlier. In 1994, Tim Burton directed his own rendition of Ed Wood's life and career, albeit with considerable license. Among those sharply criticizing the movie was Dolores Fuller, who objected to the film's portrayal of her. Among other things, it showed her leaving Wood because he insisted on befriending "weirdoes," rather than because of his alcoholism, which was never shown. The movie was also accused by some of going after the cheap "fag joke" with Bill Murray's portrayal of Bunny Breckenridge, and it completely omitted any indications of Criswell's own homosexuality. It also implied that Wood resented Reynold's involvement in Plan 9, when in fact he actually got on quite well with his backer during the making of the film; only after the film's completion did his relationship with Reynolds fell apart. Granted, the movie did convey to a large mainstream audience the idea that a man could enjoy wearing women's clothes without necessarily being gay or effeminate, something Wood himself had hoped to do with Glen or Glenda, and was an entertaining and sympathetic portrayal of a man who sincerely wanted to be a great filmmaker, but failed both miserably and nobly. Perhaps because it was made largely for laughs, the film focused on Wood's quixotic enthusiasm for his film making efforts, while leaving out the tragic decline his enthusiasm, his finances, and his health took in the last twenty years of his life. Ed Wood at Brian's Drive-In Theater
|
||||||||||
