Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?- Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio)

Ask for a poll of the greatest director of all time, and you will have a huge deadlock, as name after name is thrown into the mix: Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Bergman, Kubrick, Spielberg, Wilder, Scorsese, Lean, etc. Ask somebody to name a candidate for the WORST director of all time, though, and one name will pop up almost all of the time: Edward D. Wood Jr.

Tim Burton grew up, like a lot of people perhaps did, watching the low budget, “b” movies of Ed Wood. As an upstart filmmaker, he also befriended Vincent Price during the latter’s last years. Knowing about Ed Wood’s friendship with film star Bela Lugosi (Forever known as Dracula) during that man’s twilight years, Tim Burton was more then enthusiastic to jump at doing a film biography of the low budget filmmaker, particularly with a marvelous script written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Adapted from Rudolph Grey’s book Nightmare of Ecstasy). A movie about Ed Wood could have very easily have been a deconstruction into this man, and could have focused on problems he had later in his life (Namely his personal fetishes and his financial problems: By the 1960s and 1970s, he was making softcore pornography). However, while negative aspects of Ed Wood’s life are certainly seen, the movie also presents a more positive viewpoint of the director as well, which might cause some people to think about him in a different way.

The movie shows the highlights of Ed Wood’s (Johnny Depp) life during the mid-late 1950s, when he made what are considered his “classics”. It starts off when Ed gets involved in making Glen or Glenda, a movie about transvestites. This movie is actually used by Ed as a chance to reveal to his girlfriend, Dolores (Sara Jessica Parker), that he is a cross-dresser [It turns out that Ed does it more for comfort rather then pleasure. This story is also true; Ed even landed at Tarawa during World War II wearing women’s undergarments!] After much difficulty, and studio meddling, Ed makes Bride of the Monster and then his “masterpiece” Plan 9 from Outer Space. Ed works with what can be considered freaks or, as Dolores puts it, “misfits and dope bags”. This includes his future wife Kathy (Patricia Arquette), the, um, “flamboyant” Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray), pro-wrestler Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele), T.V star Vampira (Lisa Marie), Criswell the psychic (Jeffrey Jones) and, most notably, down on his luck ex-star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), whom Ed forms a tight friendship with and casts as the main attraction in his movies while Lugosi battles his own personal demons.

The cast is a terrific ensemble. Depp always seems to vanish into his parts, and he does so in here: Ed Wood may be a con artist, but Depp adds depth to him (Ha ha! Aren't I funny), as he makes Ed Wood out to be enthusiastic, energetic and, above all, very positive (When a play of his early on is ripped apart by a critic, Wood says that the critic “says the costumes are realistic; that’s a praise!”). Both Parker and Arquette look the same or at least have similar wigs, but they turn out good performances. Murray is a crack up along with Jones [A note about Criswell: Contrary to what the movie depicts, Criswell was not an off the wall psychic. He might have been wrong sometimes or just lucky, but some of his predictions were right on. His most notable one was that something bad would happen to JFK in November 1963]. Even the minor supporting parts are memorable, such as Mike Starr (Dumb and Dumber) as producer George Weiss (When Ed asks him if Glen or Glenda has a script yet, Weiss replies “F*ck no, but there’s a poster”), Rance Howard as a slaughter house owner who agrees to fund Bride of the Monster under a couple of conditions (One being that “The movie ends with a big explosion; sky full of smoke”), G.D. Spradlin as the Reverend (Whose church puts up the money to make Plan 9) and Juliet Landau as Loretta King, whom Ed casts as the lead actress in Bride of the Monster believing that she will have the funds to pay for it.

It is Landau, however, whom stands out the most as Lugosi. Some thought that Landau’s Oscar for best supporting actor was more a “lifetime achievement” type-thing, but anyone who watches the movie can see how he also won it. His physical, emotional and accent work is brilliant, to say the least, as he does more then just impersonate Lugosi, but become him. He has several great scenes: Some heartbreaking (When he admits that he has a drug problem to Ed), some hilarious (“The Octopus fight”), some insightful (When talking about the older horror movies) and some dramatic (His final speech at a street corner). Landau’s best moment for me (Or at least the moment that caused me to laugh the hardest) was when he berated a stagehand whom harmlessly said that he was “Karloff’s sidekick” in The Invisible Ray. [The movie seems to suggest that Lugosi and Karloff were in conflict with each other. In reality, they weren’t: In fact, they weren’t in any conflict at all. They just didn’t mind one another. It is true, though, that Lugosi looked down on the part of the Frankenstein monster, seeing it as unglamorous with little acting skill involved and essentially a ‘boogieman’, saying in one scene of the movie- a little regretfully- that he thought he was “too distinguished” to play the part. Ironically, he would grudgingly play the part in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943).] It is a great actor giving a great performance of another great actor.

There is also a memorable cameo from D’Onofrio as Orson Welles. Wood compares himself at some points in the movie to Welles (Being a producer, actor, director and writer), but is absolutely humbled to be in the presence of the genius himself. D’Onofrio, with some make-up and grooming, looks very much like “the boy genius”, but his voice wasn’t convincing enough, so his lines were dubbed by Maurice LaMarche, whom has difficultly matching the first few lines, but then synchronizes it perfectly. [The scene is also one of the surprisingly few major inaccuracies with the movie, since Wood never got advice from or even met Welles. Wikipedia, however, offers the interpretation that the scene is a hallucination, caused by Wood’s drinking and his mental state at the time, which can also explain the fairy-tale like ending of the movie with Plan 9 having a glorious premiere and happiness between Ed and Kathy].

For various reasons, perhaps to heighten the atmosphere of the movie (Or, as suggested on the IMDB, because nobody knew what Lugosi should look like in a color movie), Ed Wood was filmed in black and white. Cinematographer Stefan Czapsky uses it to great advantage. Black and white is much more expressionistic and mysterious, and this is exploited through usage of shadows. Black and white also gives the movie a sense of the time period and setting of Ed Wood’s movies. Quite a few of the people whom watch this movie most likely remember watching Wood’s movies on late night T.V, and the choice in cinematography gives the movie the feeling of a homage.

Was Ed Wood a terrible filmmaker? Yeah, for the most part. His movies were evidently cheap and, even without outside interference, were often miscast. Ed also seems to exist on the idea of “spur of the moment” filmmaking, which has its advantages and, even more obvious, disadvantages. Even so, something about Wood’s movies still stand out as depicted in here. They were terrible, yeah, but Ed never saw them like that: He had an enormous enthusiasm and desire to make movies that he wanted to make, and he was open minded and non-judgmental (“If I was, I wouldn’t have any friends”) and had never ending creativity. Ed Wood still believed in the magic and joy of cinema and, had he been given somewhat bigger budgets or bigger stars, who knows what he could have done. He probably would have still made cr*p, but at least it would have been “respectable” cr*p.

To paraphrase a line from Stephen_Murray's excellent review, Ed Wood is "The best movie about Hollywood also-rans since Sunset Boulevard."

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening