Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060192/0601420.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 79

The World's Worst Director


Edward D. Wood Jr.'s '50s films are stupefyingly inept -- and so
much more

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Bad used to be a bad word. This was decades ago, when the
creators and consumers of popular culture shared a notion of
quality. A good movie possessed wit, style, coherence --
competence. It had a story and stars that persuaded the viewer
to get lost in the fiction. Movies did what entertainment was
meant to do: suspend disbelief.

    Bad movies -- cheap horror films, dingy porno, old
instructional pictures on dating technique -- suspend belief.
They become documentaries of people trying to make a good movie.
With their preposterous narratives, fractured editing, tatty
sets and monotonous line readings, they play like doomed dress
rehearsals. First you are drawn into the catastrophe of the
filmmaking process, like a rubbernecking motorist passing a road
kill. Then you notice that these movies are doubly subversive:
they not only subvert themselves, they rebel against the timid
rules of traditional filmmaking. In this sense, bad movies are
the first modernist movies, as the French long ago realized.
"Learn to go see the `worst' films," wrote Ado Kyrou in the 1957
Le Surrealisme au Cinema. "They are sometimes sublime."

    The films of Edward D. Wood Jr. used to be just the old
kind of bad. Wood's transvestite tale Glen or Glenda (1953)
made a stir with "The Strange Case of a `Man' Who Changed His
Sex!" -- though actually Glen only wanted to change his frocks.
But Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from
Outer Space (1956), Night of the Ghouls (1958) and The Sinister
Urge (1961) went right into the commode. "Ed was a loser in my
book," says the B-movie mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff. "Fundamentally,
there were just too many things deficient."

    Deficient? The word does no justice to Wood's work -- to
Bela Lugosi's mad monologues in Glen or Glenda ("Bevare of the
big green dragon that sits on your doorstep!" he intones
between stock shots of atom-bomb blasts and buffalo herds. "He
eats little boys! Puppy-dog tails! Big fat snails!"); to Bride
of the Monster's rubber octopus with a broken tentacle, which
Wood stole from Republic Studios; to Lugosi's double in Plan 9,
who is a head taller than the star (who died during the
filming) and must cover his face with a cape; to the thespian
exertions of 400-lb. ex-wrestler Tor Johnson in Night of the
Ghouls; to the rantings of TV mystic Criswell in the 1965 nudie
horror musical Orgy of the Dead ("Torture! Torture! It pleasures
me!").

    Wood was, no question, a stupefyingly inept director. But
he also had to make his movies in no time (three, maybe six,
days) on weeny budgets (Jail Bait cost $22,000). He got Plan 9
financed by some Southern Baptists; he gave leading roles in
Bride of the Monster to anyone who would fund the movie. "Eddie
paid me off in cash," says actor Lyle Talbot, who was in Plan
9, "and sometimes it was a lot of singles."

    In Wood's life, though, as limned in Rudolph Grey's new
biography, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D.
Wood, Jr. (published by the aptly named Feral House), there is
a lot of American tragedy. For Wood carried a triple burden: he
was a transvestite, an alcoholic and a dreamer. As a Marine
during World War II, he made beach landings wearing bra and
panties under his uniform. Demobbed, he played a half man-half
woman in a carnival before arriving in Hollywood to satisfy his
twin obsessions: filmmaking and angora sweaters. The
confessional Glen or Glenda, in which he played the title roles,
was the apex of Wood's career. Later he was reduced to writing
trash novels (Night Time Lez, Hell Chicks, Purple Thighs) and
shooting porno shorts. In 1978, at 54, he died of a heart attack
-- spent for his art.

    And just at this time, movie revisionists discovered Ed
Wood. For the 1980 Golden Turkey Awards, Wood was voted "The
Worst Director of All Time," and Plan 9 "The Worst Film of All
Time." Critic J. Hoberman, in the book Midnight Movies,
proclaimed Wood "the ultimate cult director, the terminal
manifestation of `expressive esoterica.' " Glen or Glenda showed
up on the late-night circuit, and soon much of the auteur's
awful oeuvre was available on videocassette. Now Wood, anonymous
in life, is notorious in death. He wrote but did not direct Orgy
of the Dead; yet the video box ballyhoos it as "Ed Wood Jr.'s
Masterpiece of Erotic Horror -- from the Creator of Plan 9 from
Outer Space."

    Grey calls those who treat Wood with benign contempt
"jackals of bourgeois sensibility." And he's right. As critic
Jim Morton notes, "If there is a `worst film ever made,' it is
one that is boring -- a sin Ed Wood Jr. is rarely guilty of."
But there is a more melancholy irony to be found in Grey's
interviews with the director's colleagues. Unlike most
trashmeisters, Wood had radical messages for his audience: about
sexual tolerance (Glen or Glenda), nuclear madness (Plan 9),
parental smugness (The Sinister Urge). He was as dedicated to
filmmaking as Welles or Kurosawa. He just wasn't any good at it.
Not by any standards: the old solemn ones of craft and glamour
or the new giggly ones of condescension and camp.

    So hail to the man whose films were too bad to be bad. He
has finally inspired a work worthy of his ambitions. Delirious
and horrifying -- and All True! -- Nightmare of Ecstasy is
better than any Ed Wood film. No, the book deserves a higher
compliment: it's worse!