Oliver Evans reviews Will Sloan’s new biography “Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA.”
Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA by Will Sloan. OR Books, 2025. 174 pages.
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, “Your daily newspapers, radio, and television dare to relate the latest in juvenile delinquency.” Some stock footage plays: a stolen car goes off a cliff, spilling out mangled greasers and garbled chrome. This is 1959, daddy-o.
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’s running and running in the blackness. She trips in the dirt. A woman’s 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’s one too.
These are among the first images you see in Edward D. Wood Jr.’s 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—a nobody in his day—developed a reputation as one of the medium’s 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 “Worst Director of All Time.” Wood’s 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.
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’s 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’s 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—blackface minstrel acts, stripteases, nature footage—are 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 “Vampira” Nurmi, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, TV psychic “The Amazing Criswell”) haunt the frame, effigies of broken dreams and failed glamour.
The vernacular surrealism that Wood’s work occasionally embodies is the starting point for Will Sloan’s new book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA. Sloan’s is the latest in a series of contemporary attempts to complicate Wood’s 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 “unusual images” 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.
Sloan’s 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’être from their confrontation with polite notions of “Good Taste.” Bad movies—in all their preposterous, unsanctioned glory—offered the ultimate antithesis. “[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,” 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.
It was a more condescending mode of cult appreciation that first etched Wood’s name into the annals of film history. The Medved brothers’ 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards—a follow-up to their earlier The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and How They Got That Way) (1978)—anointed Wood the “Worst Director of All Time,” also naming Plan 9 from Outer Space “The Worst Film of All Time.” Wood is still remembered by these labels when he is remembered at all. A direct line can be traced from the Medveds’ sneering pursuit of risibility (their introduction claims that “people show greater enthusiasm in laughing together over films they despise than in trying to praise the films they admire”) to a contemporary canon of so-bad-it’s-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—like the bullied child who decides that self-abasement is marginally preferable—offer up their earnest creations as fodder for mean amusement.
Sloan’s 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’s proposed critical language—that of “distinctiveness” and “fascination”—is 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’s belies its relatively traditionalist basis in film criticism’s most enduring tradition: the auteur theory.
There is a symmetry to Sloan’s approach given that “la politique des auteurs” was partly developed as a way for the French Cahiers du cinéma 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—practically any name will do—has become evidence of artistic merit. The marketing departments of major studios now regularly publicize even their dullest hacks as “visionary minds” (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 “vulgar auteurism” to promote the perceived stylistic accomplishments of directors such as Michael Bay (director of Paramount Pictures’ first five Transformers films), Justin Lin (director of several entries in Universal Pictures’ 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 “chased” by a wave of subzero air). The internet’s 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. “Distinctive” is a fine measure of artistry, so long as we remember to include “distinctively banal,” “distinctively crass,” and “distinctively cruel.”
Sloan’s discussion of auteurism recalls the more minimalist definition proposed by Jacques Rivette, in André Bazin’s rewording: “[A]n auteur is someone who speaks in the first person.” (Significantly, Sloan does not ascribe to Andrew Sarris’s belief that auteurs must be “technically competent.”) 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’s 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—a completist of the highest, most perverse order—has bottom-trawled every bit of hackwork, ephemera, and dubiously attributed scrap in Wood’s back catalog in search of his grubby fingerprints. A good chunk of the book’s 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 “The clothes make the man! Don’t you ever forget that! And the panties make the chick!” has the Woodsian flourish, whereas “This is much better than the zoo” and “It’s soooo big” do not.) Elsewhere, he recounts an unpleasant litany of scenes of sexual violence in Wood’s 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: “Auteur, yes, but of what?”
¤
What interests me about Wood is that he was already trying to make a kind of “bad” 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 “SAUCERS SEEN OVER HOLLYWOOD” is immediately followed by a scene in which an army colonel explains how the “upper echelon has been ruthlessly successful at covering up hard evidence of the aliens’ existence.” Sloan insightfully suggests that these scenes are both in the film because Wood has seen other, more expensive films where these things happen—never mind that they don’t 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’s off-kilter misinterpretation of cliché gives powerful form. In the book, Sloan writes convincingly that Wood’s films “force us to understand that Los Angeles is a finite space with a thin line between fame and obscurity.” Elsewhere, his attempts to justify Wood as an artist are limited by the limits of his subject, a predicament best encapsulated by Sloan’s slightly defeated inability to move beyond the descriptor “dreamlike.”
Wood’s 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 “transvestite” (this is the term used by the film) who hides his alter ego, Glenda, from his fiancée Barbara. This half ends with Glen/Glenda coming out to Barbara—as a sign of acceptance, she gifts him her angora sweater (a material that reappears with fetishistic prominence throughout Wood’s work). The second half of the film, told mainly through stock footage, tells the story of “Tommy” Haynes’s Anne (previously Alan), an intersex World War II veteran who undergoes a “sex change” 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’s politics. That said, the film’s position on its subject is incoherent and at times off-putting. The narrator simultaneously claims that gender nonconformity is justifiably unnatural—just as cars and planes are useful and necessary even if they are beyond nature—and supremely natural. (During one uncomfortable sequence, some footage shows ambiguously located tribespeople dancing, while a voice-over says, “In the lesser civilized part of the world, it’s the male who adorns himself with fancy objects, such as paints, frills, and masks. The true instinct—the animal instinct.”) Glen is “cured” at the end of the film by “transferring” the Glenda persona onto his fiancée, 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’s behavior is perfectly healthy. Anne’s transition is presented as acceptable only on the proviso that she is “instructed in,” and conforms to, the restrictive norms of 1950s femininity.
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’s perspective make sense when you realize it is a docufiction in which the “docu” and “fiction” elements are in open conflict—part exploitation film intending to cash in on its transgressive subject matter, part heartfelt expression of its maker’s fraught queerness. The questions about Wood’s identity raised by Glen or Glenda are handled with sensitivity by Sloan, who traces the film’s knotty sexual politics without claiming to disentangle them.
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’s wishes by a producer. A dream sequence shows the Devil pursuing Glenda before morphing into Barbara, soundtracked by a young girl chanting, “I’m a girl … I’m not … You’re a boy … a puppy dog tail!” 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’s filmography, is rich with false significance.
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 “Scientist.” 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’s delirious script, which includes lines like “Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep! He eats little boys, puppy dog tails, and big fat snails.” Martin Landau, who plays Lugosi in the Tim Burton biopic, beautifully captures the ragged glory of his final appearances in Wood’s 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.
Wood’s 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’s failed cinema—ramshackle, reaching, obscene—is preferable to corporate mediocrity. Netflix slop like Tall Girl (a movie about a tall girl) or Murder Mystery (a murder mystery), white elephant 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’s films evoke—in J. Hoberman’s memorable phrase—“the full lunacy and pathos of Southern California,” the indefensible advertainment pumped out by today’s corporate monopolies only proves just how low the bottom line takes you. Give me cardboard tombstones over CGI superheroes any day.
Share
Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations
So bad it’s good, or all the way around to bad again? A. J. Urquidi ponders this and more at a screening of Tommy Wiseau’s sophomore film.
Conor Williams gawks at “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance” by John Waters.
Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!