Oliver Evans reviews Will Sloan\u2019s new biography \u201cEd Wood: Made in Hollywood USA.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA by Will Sloan. OR Books, 2025. 174 pages.<\/p>\n
A POLICE STATION in the City of Angels. A car has been stolen, some old-timers have been given a fright, and a young buck has been brought in, bound for a night in the drunk tank. Jeaned and bobby-soxed kids jive on linoleum checkerboard or fight in the streets, while a voice-over intones, \u201cYour daily newspapers, radio, and television dare to relate the latest in juvenile delinquency.\u201d Some stock footage plays: a stolen car goes off a cliff, spilling out mangled greasers and garbled chrome. This is 1959, daddy-o.<\/p>\n
Cut to a guy and a gal sitting in the front seat of a parked convertible in some out-of-the-way spot. He goes in for a kiss, but she slaps him and runs out into the night. An old tumbledown house looms up against the moon, and now she\u2019s running and running in the blackness. She trips in the dirt. A woman\u2019s face, crowned and death-shrouded, materializes from the shadows, white visible all around the irises. This ancient ghoulish entity descends on the girl, whose final act is to scream. The boy from the convertible bursts onto the scene and finds her corpse. A few seconds later, he\u2019s one too.<\/p>\n
These are among the first images you see in Edward D. Wood Jr.\u2019s 1959 horror film Night of the Ghouls, the fifth feature film by the notorious director of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). A woefully unskilled amateur who subsisted on the fringes of Hollywood in its Golden Age, Wood made no-budget Z movies about macabre happenings, alien invasions, mad scientists, and, later, people fucking. His films are immediately identifiable by their dingy and threadbare sets, indiscriminately used stock footage, awkward dialogue, baffling plots, and guileless special effects. They feature histrionic or wooden performances (and none between those two extremes) delivered by a repertory company of failed, forgotten, wannabe, and untrained actors. Wood\u2014a nobody in his day\u2014developed a reputation as one of the medium\u2019s most laughable practitioners after his films were used as schedule-padding by TV networks, fomenting an ironic cult around his work that consolidated his reputation as the \u201cWorst Director of All Time.\u201d Wood\u2019s notoriety completed its bizarre arc in 1994 with the release of an Oscar-winning, Disney-produced Hollywood biopic, Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton at the peak of his 1990s fame and starring Gen X art-throb Johnny Depp in the title role.<\/p>\n
Ed Wood made drab and interminable films. There are no two ways about it. Searching for salutary passages in his filmography is like truffling in shit. But, as the opening sequence in Night of the Ghouls demonstrates, Wood\u2019s extreme and sometimes touching ineptitude could produce cinematic sequences that are compelling in their unforeseen oddness. Forcefully misconstruing the Hollywood conventions they aim to pastiche, films such as Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 from Outer Space offer a fun house mirror view of American moviemaking in its classical, hegemonic period. In their most absent-minded moments, Wood\u2019s films stumble upon an unmoored cinematic grammar that mixes the kitsch iconography of the midcentury B picture with a queasily decomposed sense of narrative and spatial continuity. Stock images and material from other projects\u2014blackface minstrel acts, stripteases, nature footage\u2014are beamed into his films at seemingly random moments, a junk-shop mockery of modernist bricolage. Abandoned ex-stars (Bela Lugosi, aging matinee idols Lyle Talbot and Tom Keene) and showbiz freaks (horror host Maila \u201cVampira\u201d Nurmi, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, TV psychic \u201cThe Amazing Criswell\u201d) haunt the frame, effigies of broken dreams and failed glamour.<\/p>\n
The vernacular surrealism that Wood\u2019s work occasionally embodies is the starting point for Will Sloan\u2019s new book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA. Sloan\u2019s is the latest in a series of contemporary attempts to complicate Wood\u2019s reputation as a merely bad filmmaker, positioning him instead as an accidental avant-gardist whose work embodies a fraught queerness and delimits the Hollywood margins in which he plied his trade. An affable and stylish writer, Sloan insists that Wood is worth taking seriously as an artist, not just as a phenomenon. In his telling, Wood creates powerful dreamscapes whose \u201cunusual images\u201d demonstrate that distinctiveness is a more useful criterion of value than mere professionalism or competency. The worst film by Ed Wood is more interesting than the best film by Ron Howard, Sloan argues, which is admittedly a checkmate.<\/p>\n
Sloan\u2019s book arrives after half a century of writing on Wood, most of which can be found in cult fanzines on trash and exploitation cinema. Publications like Psychotronic Video magazine and the 1985 edited collection Incredibly Strange Films derived a raison d\u2019\u00eatre from their confrontation with polite notions of \u201cGood Taste.\u201d Bad movies\u2014in all their preposterous, unsanctioned glory\u2014offered the ultimate antithesis. \u201c[T]he whole concept of Good Taste is concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling in a crassness that passeth all understanding,\u201d wrote the music critic and psychotronic film appreciator Lester Bangs, crystallizing a late 20th-century underground worldview that celebrated excess, provocation, and libidinism above all else.<\/p>\n
It was a more condescending mode of cult appreciation that first etched Wood\u2019s name into the annals of film history. The Medved brothers\u2019 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards\u2014a follow-up to their earlier The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and How They Got That Way) (1978)\u2014anointed Wood the \u201cWorst Director of All Time,\u201d also naming Plan 9 from Outer Space \u201cThe Worst Film of All Time.\u201d Wood is still remembered by these labels when he is remembered at all. A direct line can be traced from the Medveds\u2019 sneering pursuit of risibility (their introduction claims that \u201cpeople show greater enthusiasm in laughing together over films they despise than in trying to praise the films they admire\u201d) to a contemporary canon of so-bad-it\u2019s-good cinema oriented around the likes of Tommy Wiseau (The Room, 2003), Neil Breen (Fateful Findings, 2012) and James Nguyen (Birdemic: Shock and Terror, 2010). These directors, forced to get in on the joke, have developed cottage industries out of ritual self-humiliation. Regularly appearing in front of braying audiences who shout and throw things, they\u2014like the bullied child who decides that self-abasement is marginally preferable\u2014offer up their earnest creations as fodder for mean amusement.<\/p>\n
Sloan\u2019s book sits apart from this lineage in that he approaches Wood not as an object of cult fascination or potential derision but as a subject worthy of consecration by serious criticism. For half a century Wood has been the lens through which practically all discussions of bad or failed filmmaking have been refracted, but here he is removed from the good\/bad binary altogether. Sloan\u2019s proposed critical language\u2014that of \u201cdistinctiveness\u201d and \u201cfascination\u201d\u2014is crafted to deal a fair hand to the outsider Wood, whose work is manifestly incapable of withstanding conventional critical judgments. This admirable attempt to extend critical value to maverick gutter art like Wood\u2019s belies its relatively traditionalist basis in film criticism\u2019s most enduring tradition: the auteur theory.<\/p>\n
There is a symmetry to Sloan\u2019s approach given that \u201cla politique des auteurs\u201d was partly developed as a way for the French Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma critics to justify their love of American commercial junk. The Cahiers auteurists saw cinema as an art rather than an industrial product primarily shaped by producers, arguing that Hollywood directors like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock were the authors of their films, infusing them with a distinct and visible set of preoccupations. But what began as a way to recover artistic merit from a commercial process has since become a tautology. Today, the mere invocation of a name\u2014practically any name will do\u2014has become evidence of artistic merit. The marketing departments of major studios now regularly publicize even their dullest hacks as \u201cvisionary minds\u201d (a label I have seen attached to such era-defining artists as Gore Verbinski and Alex Proyas). The 2010s saw a further mutation of the idea when a movement of (extremely online) cinephiles coined the term \u201cvulgar auteurism\u201d to promote the perceived stylistic accomplishments of directors such as Michael Bay (director of Paramount Pictures\u2019 first five Transformers films), Justin Lin (director of several entries in Universal Pictures\u2019 Fast & Furious franchise), and Roland Emmerich, a man who thinks you can outrun the freezing point (see his 2004 eco-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, in which some characters are \u201cchased\u201d by a wave of subzero air). The internet\u2019s decentralization of taste and its democratic promotion of cineliteracy are beautiful things, but there is nothing democratic about the spiritually ugly products of American cultural imperialism. \u201cDistinctive\u201d is a fine measure of artistry, so long as we remember to include \u201cdistinctively banal,\u201d \u201cdistinctively crass,\u201d and \u201cdistinctively cruel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sloan\u2019s discussion of auteurism recalls the more minimalist definition proposed by Jacques Rivette, in Andr\u00e9 Bazin\u2019s rewording: \u201c[A]n auteur is someone who speaks in the first person.\u201d (Significantly, Sloan does not ascribe to Andrew Sarris\u2019s belief that auteurs must be \u201ctechnically competent.\u201d) Even with this more agile redefinition in hand, however, the book cannot help but lapse into the kind of unedifying connoisseurship that is so often the terminus of an excessive fixation on authorship. The entirety of Wood\u2019s career is documented in detail, including his later, alcohol-soaked years directing hardcore pornography, as well as his prolific work as the writer of some quite rancid erotica (titles include Bloodiest Sex Crimes in History, Forced Entry, Raped in the Grass, and The Perverts). Sloan\u2014a completist of the highest, most perverse order\u2014has bottom-trawled every bit of hackwork, ephemera, and dubiously attributed scrap in Wood\u2019s back catalog in search of his grubby fingerprints. A good chunk of the book\u2019s later portions is taken up with such discussions as Does this line of throwaway dialogue in an unattributed hardcore short sound like Wood or not? (FYI: Sloan thinks \u201cThe clothes make the man! Don\u2019t you ever forget that! And the panties make the chick!\u201d has the Woodsian flourish, whereas \u201cThis is much better than the zoo\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s soooo big\u201d do not.) Elsewhere, he recounts an unpleasant litany of scenes of sexual violence in Wood\u2019s fiction, a passage that feels motivated by an obligation to acknowledge the ickier side of Wood. At a certain point, it all invites the same question Bazin, the chief skeptic of the Cahiers auteurists, first posed decades ago: \u201cAuteur, yes, but of what?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a4<\/p>\n
What interests me about Wood is that he was already trying to make a kind of \u201cbad\u201d movie. That he failed even in that limited ambition, and failed so extremely, gives his work its moving air of illegitimacy and misguided passion. Sloan is extremely alive to this quality in Wood. He notes that in Plan 9, for example, a montage showing the newspaper headline \u201cSAUCERS SEEN OVER HOLLYWOOD\u201d is immediately followed by a scene in which an army colonel explains how the \u201cupper echelon has been ruthlessly successful at covering up hard evidence of the aliens\u2019 existence.\u201d Sloan insightfully suggests that these scenes are both in the film because Wood has seen other, more expensive films where these things happen\u2014never mind that they don\u2019t make sense when placed together. Wood plied his trade in the destitute world of Poverty Row, a scuzzy, shadow Hollywood populated by rejects, to which Wood\u2019s off-kilter misinterpretation of clich\u00e9 gives powerful form. In the book, Sloan writes convincingly that Wood\u2019s films \u201cforce us to understand that Los Angeles is a finite space with a thin line between fame and obscurity.\u201d Elsewhere, his attempts to justify Wood as an artist are limited by the limits of his subject, a predicament best encapsulated by Sloan\u2019s slightly defeated inability to move beyond the descriptor \u201cdreamlike.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wood\u2019s first film, Glen or Glenda, is the most compelling argument that he was occasionally onto something. A film in two parts, the first half follows Glen, a closeted \u201ctransvestite\u201d (this is the term used by the film) who hides his alter ego, Glenda, from his fianc\u00e9e Barbara. This half ends with Glen\/Glenda coming out to Barbara\u2014as a sign of acceptance, she gifts him her angora sweater (a material that reappears with fetishistic prominence throughout Wood\u2019s work). The second half of the film, told mainly through stock footage, tells the story of \u201cTommy\u201d Haynes\u2019s Anne (previously Alan), an intersex World War II veteran who undergoes a \u201csex change\u201d and lives her remaining life happily as a woman. The frankness and relative acceptance with which a film from 1953 discusses gender nonconformity is enough to make Glen or Glenda remarkable, particularly from the grim perspective of today\u2019s politics. That said, the film\u2019s position on its subject is incoherent and at times off-putting. The narrator simultaneously claims that gender nonconformity is justifiably unnatural\u2014just as cars and planes are useful and necessary even if they are beyond nature\u2014and supremely natural. (During one uncomfortable sequence, some footage shows ambiguously located tribespeople dancing, while a voice-over says, \u201cIn the lesser civilized part of the world, it\u2019s the male who adorns himself with fancy objects, such as paints, frills, and masks. The true instinct\u2014the animal instinct.\u201d) Glen is \u201ccured\u201d at the end of the film by \u201ctransferring\u201d the Glenda persona onto his fianc\u00e9e, despite the earlier moment of acceptance with the angora sweater. This cod-psychological explanation is offered by the Dr. Alton character (Timothy Farrell), who is seen earlier in the film arguing that Glen\/Glenda\u2019s behavior is perfectly healthy. Anne\u2019s transition is presented as acceptable only on the proviso that she is \u201cinstructed in,\u201d and conforms to, the restrictive norms of 1950s femininity.<\/p>\n
One of the things that makes the film so undeniable, even when it is uncomfortable, is that Wood himself plays Glen\/Glenda, while his then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller (who would go on to write songs for Elvis Presley) plays Barbara. An open cross-dresser for most of his life, Wood made Glen or Glenda as a way of coming out to Fuller, who was unaware prior to filming. Some of the earnest contradictions in the film\u2019s perspective make sense when you realize it is a docufiction in which the \u201cdocu\u201d and \u201cfiction\u201d elements are in open conflict\u2014part exploitation film intending to cash in on its transgressive subject matter, part heartfelt expression of its maker\u2019s fraught queerness. The questions about Wood\u2019s identity raised by Glen or Glenda are handled with sensitivity by Sloan, who traces the film\u2019s knotty sexual politics without claiming to disentangle them.<\/p>\n
Watching Glen or Glenda, it is easy to think you are falling asleep. The film lurches woozily from one jumbled image to another, apparently linked by the deteriorated logic of the dwindling consciousness. Several minutes of striptease and BDSM footage randomly play, spliced into the film against Wood\u2019s wishes by a producer. A dream sequence shows the Devil pursuing Glenda before morphing into Barbara, soundtracked by a young girl chanting, \u201cI\u2019m a girl \u2026 I\u2019m not \u2026 You\u2019re a boy \u2026 a puppy dog tail!\u201d Two voices debate transgender politics over some stock imagery of metal being smelted and worked in a foundry. An image of a lightning strike punctuates the film, a recurring motif that, like many in Wood\u2019s filmography, is rich with false significance.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most bizarrely, a time-ravaged Bela Lugosi appears in an unexplained frame narrative. Lugosi, who had failed to achieve the long-term success of his colleague and sometime rival Boris Karloff, was at this point languishing in poverty and addiction, stuck playing mad scientists in cheap B movies (his previous credit before Glen or Glenda was titled Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla). Wood only had him on set for one day, but he appears throughout the film as an ambiguous chorus figure, billed simply as \u201cScientist.\u201d Surrounded by smoking test tubes and beakers filled with garish liquids, he makes obscure proclamations about life, death, and the universe itself. An occult connection between Lugosi and the fates of the characters on-screen is insinuated, although never explained. The wacky mobility of his voice and face, as capricious as the Carpathians, is well suited to Wood\u2019s delirious script, which includes lines like \u201cBeware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep! He eats little boys, puppy dog tails, and big fat snails.\u201d Martin Landau, who plays Lugosi in the Tim Burton biopic, beautifully captures the ragged glory of his final appearances in Wood\u2019s films. Among them is a posthumous credit in Plan 9 from Outer Space, in which he is doubled in some scenes by a local chiropractor in a Dracula cape.<\/p>\n
Wood\u2019s films may be bad, but the confused, art brut majesty of Glen or Glenda shows that badness can sometimes generate possibilities that merely good films cannot begin to conceive of. Even in their most boring moments (of which there are many), his films show that yesterday\u2019s failed cinema\u2014ramshackle, reaching, obscene\u2014is preferable to corporate mediocrity. Netflix slop like Tall Girl (a movie about a tall girl) or Murder Mystery (a murder mystery), white elephant<\/a> monuments to intellectual property law made by the Marvel corporation, and anything by Tim Burton from the last 15 years all demonstrate just how bad bad films have become. Where Wood\u2019s films evoke\u2014in J. Hoberman\u2019s memorable phrase\u2014\u201cthe full lunacy and pathos of Southern California,\u201d the indefensible advertainment pumped out by today\u2019s corporate monopolies only proves just how low the bottom line takes you. Give me cardboard tombstones over CGI superheroes any day.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n So bad it\u2019s good, or all the way around to bad again? A. J. Urquidi ponders this and more at a screening of Tommy Wiseau\u2019s sophomore film.<\/p>\n A. J. Urquidi<\/a>Dec 5, 2023<\/p>\n Conor Williams gawks at \u201cLiarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance\u201d by John Waters.<\/p>\n