The Disorienting and Demented World of Ed Wood

“Without obsession, life is nothing.” Sure, it was our Queer Confucius John Waters who supposedly uttered this maxim, but this guiding artistic sentiment perhaps applies even more accurately to Waters’ “gutter film” predecessor, the notorious Ed Wood Jr. In his illuminating recent book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (via OR Books), Will Sloan interrogates how Wood’s movies were passion projects or labours of love that he was compelled to make despite overwhelming obstacles (budgetary constraints, technical ineptitude, industry contempt, public indifference and chronic alcoholism) to express his own highly idiosyncratic obsessions, fixations and fetishes. Or as Jim Morton argues in Incredibly Strange Films (1985), “Lesser men, if forced to make movies under the conditions Wood faced, would have thrown up their hands in defeat.”

For anyone uninitiated in the wild, wild world of Wood, a quick recap: Twisted visionary Edward D Wood Jr. (10 October 1924 – 10 December 1978) was Poughkeepsie’s finest export and a World War II veteran turned naïve outsider filmmaker, actor, scriptwriter, producer, cross-dressing angora sweater fetishist and pornographer. Wood was also a prolific author of ultra-lurid horror, crime and sex pulp novels with shock buzzer titles like Suburbia Confidential, Devil Girls, Killer in Drag, Diary of a Transvestite Hooker and Young, Black and Gay. (What made jive honky Wood think he was knowledgeable about the latter subject is anybody’s guess). His literary efforts – peopled (as Sloan summarizes) with “rugged men, sex-crazed young girls, predatory old lesbians, sadistic girl-gangs, and cross-dressing young men who may or may not be gay or trans” – reached a kind of zenith with this erotic passage from Let Me Die in Drag (1967): “His tongue found her breasts. One nipple then the other, back and forth with the suction of a windshield wiper in a heavy rainstorm.”

Following his death in booze-sodden poverty and obscurity aged 54, Wood’s frequently inept but entertaining and heartfelt poverty row atrocities like Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955) and magnum opus Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) were rediscovered by a new generation of cult cinema connoisseurs. For better or for worse, Wood himself had the mixed blessing of being posthumously celebrated – sometimes ironically, sometimes affectionately – as one of the “worst” hack filmmakers ever. Indeed, in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, Wood is officially declared “The Worst Director of All Time” and Plan 9 “The Worst Film of All Time.”

In more recent years, Wood has been more generously reappraised as a maverick American auteur, admired for his tenacity, originality and feverish vision, whose films – as the late Cinema of Transgression high potentate Nick Zedd enthused in a 1985 issue of his zine The Underground Film Bulletin – invoke “a sense of the unexpected, as if they were made on another planet.” Wood’s berserk short stories have even been compiled and reissued in print as Blood Splatters Quickly (again by OR Books, in 2014). In Made in Hollywood, Sloan seeks to start afresh, asking: what if we stripped away the decades of preconceptions and ridicule and objectively interrogated the artefacts themselves? As he puts it, “One possible rejoinder to the question of ‘Who wants to watch the story of a bad artist who failed?’ is: ‘Those of us who take him seriously as an artist.'” Crucially, Sloan’s motivation isn’t trying to persuade the reader that Wood is a “good” filmmaker by objective standards. (And – it must be noted – unlike the wildly idealized 1994 Tim Burton-directed biopic, which discreetly ends circa 1959, Sloan doesn’t erase Wood’s squalid later years and forays into hardcore pornography). Instead, he writes, “the thesis I have settled on is that Wood’s art is not merely bad. I now invite you to join me as we work through what that means.”

(A quick aside: Made in Hollywood is a monograph rather than a conventional biography. It makes ideal reading in partnership with Rudolph Grey’s 1992 oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D Wood Jr. I’d also recommend watching Brett Thomson’s 1996 documentary The Haunted World of Edward D Wood Jr.)

“My biggest surprise from researching this book has been how loyal Wood remained to his preoccupations,” Sloan continues. “In film after film, novel after novel, we find him anxiously exploring the spaces between male and female, hero and villain, life and death. From his earliest short films to his last porn loops, he revisits the tropes and aesthetics of movies he loved as a child. Films and writings I had once dismissed as hackwork suddenly became infused with Wood’s personality when seen in close proximity with the rest of his oeuvre.”

A hard-drinking, cross-dressing horror movie and pornography enthusiast – where has Ed Wood been all our lives? Clearly, Wood was a minority who didn’t even fit into his own minority, and the kind of trailblazing role model that Filthy Dreamers have been pining for! Now let’s investigate some of his persistent signature themes …

Familiar faces: Like so many of our favourite filmmakers (Warhol, Waters, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Wood populated his movies with a repertory cast culled from his own freaky, readily available and willing to work cheap friends and acquaintances. Often these were characters from the threadbare outer fringes of showbiz (critic J. Hoberman vividly calls them Wood’s “entourage of Day of the Locust weirdos”), typically numbering his drinking buddies, untalented starlets, wrestlers (Tor Johnson), his girlfriend of the moment, washed-up stars from Wood’s childhood (most significantly, the desiccated, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi), down-on-their-luck horror movie hostesses (Maila Nurmi aka Vampira), chiropractors and bogus psychics (The Amazing Criswell, who also moved in Mae West’s social orbit). Interestingly, as Sloan notes, Woods was a LGBTQ ally: His “entourage included a number of closeted gay men, such as Criswell, Paul Marco, and David Demering, as well as John ‘Bunny’ Breckinridge, a socialite who announced plans (ultimately abandoned) to pursue gender-affirming surgery in the 1950s (he was a direct inspiration for Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge).”

Accidentally avant-garde: John Waters famously described the spectacularly compelling 1968 Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton mega-flop Boom! as a “failed art movie.” Similarly, Sloan argues Wood’s films were “accidentally avant-garde” or achieved “accidental surrealism.” “That word ‘accidental’ is important,” he clarifies, “because I believe that an honest analysis of his work must embrace the fact that Wood set out to make competent, professional movies in the classical Hollywood style, and failed on those terms, instead producing something much stranger.” Any representative Wood film possesses moments of hallucinatory strangeness, where you might see the devil officiating a wedding ceremony … a nuclear mushroom cloud … repeated shots of dangling paper plate flying saucers over the Los Angeles skyline … a killer octopus! And Wood’s anguished debut film, Glen or Glenda, is an experimental autobiographical cri de coeur analogous to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947).

Gender: Like the titular hayseed grave robber depicted in Netflix’s recent Ryan Murphy-produced Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Wood’s imagination was fired by the sensational 1950s tabloid coverage of Christine Jorgensen’s pioneering gender reassignment surgery. (Speaking of which, surely Gein would have been intrigued by and identified with the Plan 9’s original working title: Grave Robbers from Outer Space). Jorgensen inspired Glen or Glenda (its original working title was I Changed My Sex!). While Wood’s sexual orientation was seemingly primarily heterosexual, he was also obviously what we would now term “gender non-conforming.” Sloan nicely encapsulates Wood as “an ambiguously queer artist who used his art to work through difficult feelings.” And revealingly, Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner, authors of the 2024 book Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, cite Wood as a kindred spirit and repurpose an image of Plan 9 leading lady Vampira on its front cover.

Death fixation: Recall Criswell’s introduction (visibly reading from offscreen cue cards) to Orgy of the Dead (1965): “This is a story of those in the twilight time, once human, now monsters, in a void between the living and the dead.” Throughout Wood’s work, the barrier between the living and the dead is porous. (This is literally true in the case of Plan 9. When Lugosi died early in production, Wood simply draped his wife’s chiropractor with Lugosi’s black Dracula cape to complete his scenes.) Action unfolds in graveyards. The dead return to life as zombies and vampires. This morbidity also seeps into Wood’s recurring female characters. His dream date is seemingly torn from the pages of Edgar Allen Poe: Think of cadaverous “coffin cuties” and proto-Goths like Vampira in Plan 9, Jeannie Stevens as the Black Ghoul and Valda Hansen as the White Ghost in Night of the Ghouls (1959), Fawn Silver as the Black Ghoul (yes, that name again) in Orgy of the Dead (whose beehive hairstyle and heaving bosom anticipate Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) and Maria Arnold as Madame Heles in Necromania (1971).

Dream space: Deliberately or not, the flagrant artifice of Wood’s films frequently conjures a sense of dream (or nightmare) logic. Take Jail Bait (1954): “Wood intended to make a smooth, competent thriller in the classical Hollywood style, and failed,” Sloan reflects. “This failure is crucial to the film’s meaning. At the same time, he accidentally created a unique cinematic dream space and conjured a hypnotic mood. Whatever his intentions, I like spending time in his world.” Similarly, “Night of the Ghouls is one of those dreams where walls shift and people change identities” – which, of course, anticipates later David Lynch efforts like Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). And Sloan turns lyrical contemplating the papier-mâché graveyard in Plan 9: “Spending so much time there without any sense of the layout, one starts feeling lost in a void with no beginning or end. When Wood cuts together shots of actors traversing the same few feet of set, it’s like time and space are standing still. That the actors treat their surreal surroundings with stone-faced seriousness enhances the feeling of a dream. This tension is a big part of what makes Plan 9 still so compelling to those of us who are long immune to the shock of the film’s many obvious flubs. The set is clearly fake, but while we’re looking at it, it’s hard to remember what ‘real’ looks like.”

Fetishes: Aligned with Wood’s transvestism is his fetishistic emphasis on female clothing, particularly fluffy angora sweaters (he even sometimes penned erotica under the nom du porn “Ann Gora”). Who could forget the climax of Glen or Glenda, where Glen’s anguished fiancée Barbara demonstrates her acceptance of his cross-dressing by peeling the angora sweater off her own back and handing it to him? But consider also the fleeting but revealing moment in Bride of the Monster when plucky reporter Janet Lawton (Loretta King) is being pursued by Lobo (Tor Johnson). When Janet faints, Lobo grabs her angora beret (or more accurately, tam o’shanter), sniffs it and stuffs it into his pocket for – uh – “future use.”

There’s an arresting passage midway through Made in Hollywood when Sloan recalls how “whenever Plan 9 was on TV, friends could always expect Wood to call and alert them, no matter how late. Shortly before Wood’s death, he called writer Richard Bojarski about one such airing, and Bojarski told him that Plan 9 was becoming a popular midnight movie in New York. Wood replied, ‘They’re not laughing at me, are they?’”  At the time, Wood was on the verge of eviction and regularly getting mugged on his way home from the Pla-boy Liquor Store on Yucca Street. He had no inkling of the mockery that lay in store. Sloan does Wood the courtesy of not mocking him, explaining, “An untalented artist can still have things to teach us.” Ultimately, Sloan concludes, what all Wood’s work shares is “a yearning for an alternate realm where the rules don’t apply.” Who amongst us can’t relate to that wish?

Like the Shangri-Las song, Graham Russell is good-bad, but not evil. He’s a trash culture obsessive, occasional DJ (Cockabilly – London’s first and to date, only gay rockabilly night!), and promoter of the Lobotomy Room film club at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston. As a sporadic freelance journalist, over the years he’s contributed to everything from punk zines (MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, Flipside, Razorcake) to The Guardian and Interview magazine and interviewed the likes of John Waters, Marianne Faithfull, Poison Ivy Rorschach, Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, and Jayne County.