Edward D. Wood Jr, writer, director, producer, actor and pioneering cross-dresser, failed like no other man in Hollywood history. The worst director of all time of the worst movie - Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957) - of all time, Wood balanced a supreme self-confidence and infinite enthusiasm for cinema with a profound lack of ability and a faulty sixth sense that encouraged him to make every mistake in the book.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on October 10, 1924, Wood set the tone for his life by immediately disappointing his first audience, his parents, by coming out a boy. According to biographer Rudolph Grey, author of Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr, they'd been hoping for a girl and often compensated by dressing their young son in girls' clothing.
Years later, Wood suggested his parents' eccentric actions encouraged his transvestism. "They didn't know what the hell they were doing to me!" he cried. "If you're dressed up in little girls' clothes at the age of five you really don't have much choice in what happens afterwards."
Throughout most of his childhood, Wood escaped reality at the movies, watching endless westerns, Universal horror flicks and cliffhanger serials at the local Bardavon Theatre, where he eventually became an usher. Ed's parents, keen to encourage their son's interest, bought him a movie camera when he was just 11 years old, and he took to it immediately, busily making his first home movies.
Years later, Wood saw America with a travelling carnival, paying his way by performing as the 'He-She', a half-man, half-woman freak show attraction. When the U.S. finally woke up to World War II, Wood was determined to do his bit, joining the Marine Corps. By this time, Ed was a committed cross dresser, and often told of how, in 1941, he invaded a beach of the Pacific Islands wearing a pink bra and panties beneath his uniform.
Finally reaching Hollywood in 1948, Wood spent five years doing the rounds, making friends and minor contacts in preparation for his movie-making debut. During this time, and indeed for the rest of his life, Ed found comfort wearing fluffy pink sweaters.
"Ed wore my angora sweater while he was working late at night," remembers actress Dolores Fuller, who lived and worked with Wood for almost four years before running away to New York to study acting and write songs for Elvis (anyone remember 'Rock-a-Hula Baby' and 'Do the Clam'?). "It was cool and he wanted to feel cosy," she continued. "He said it turned him on and helped him to write."
According to Fuller, Ed "...was a young, creative, handsome man with an effervescent personality," who managed to attract quite the strangest entourage of hopefuls, has-beens and crackpot eccentrics that Hollywood had ever seen: TV psychic Criswell, hulking wrestler Tor ‘The Swedish Angel’ Johnson, TV horror hostess Maila Nurmi, better known as Vampira and, most famously, faded horror star Bela Lugosi, whose health and career had long since hit the skids.
"Nobody had made Bela an offer to do a picture for a long time," added Fuller. "He was down on his luck, he was broke and sick, and he saw in Eddie a very bright young man, and of course Eddie saw in him his chance for doing something fine in movies. They helped each other, and when Bela got in front of that camera he was wonderful. It was magic."
As a lad, Conrad Brooks dreamed of setting sail upon the ocean wave, of the freedom and adventure described by his hero, Jack London. Years later, Brooks took a trip to Hollywood and managed to bump into Ed Wood, who took it upon himself to "stick" his new pal Conrad in the pictures. "Now I've been branded," jokes Brooks, who is today regarded as something of a legend in B-movie circles, having made more than a hundred lousy low-budget flicks.
"When I first met Ed," explained Brooks, "he was doing a show at the time, a play called Casual Company. He was very ambitious, and determined to get started in Hollywood, but he had no credentials and spent too much time messing around with these stage plays. Not that that stopped him. He told my brother Henry, 'I'm gonna make it in Hollywood', just like that, and we ended up making a little home western with him, called Range Revenge."
Then the trouble started. "My brother told Ed up front that we were not going professional, or looking for a theatrical release, but that we just wanted something for ourselves and our friends. Then, on the day we started shooting, Ed says 'I'm gonna get this on film and on the market for you guys', and he wouldn't give up.
"So, anyway, it cost us 60 bucks, which was a lot of money back in 1948. We didn't mind paying Ed, though, but I remember my brother saying, 'Gee, I would have paid Ed $60 just to stay away from our picture,' because once he took over we couldn't control him. He took over the direction, he started shooting some pretty wild scenes, he didn't follow the script, and my brother was really peeved at him, but by the end of the shoot he forgave him because we'd had so much fun!"
Throughout the Fifties, Wood was fond of describing himself as "another Orson Welles", and is reported to have seen the classic Citizen Kane (1942) more than 50 times. Finally, in 1953, Wood was given a chance to prove his ability, or lack of it, and the result, written and directed in about a week-and-a-half, was the deeply personal Glen or Glenda, co-starring Wood and Dolores Fuller with bizarre inserts of Bela Lugosi - "Ah, snips and snails and puppy dogs tails..." - and stock footage that Wood had managed to pick up over the years. The resulting feature can be most generously described as surreal.
"I did the movie with Ed," explains Fuller, "because he promised me that once he had his writer/director credit we could move on to better things. But that never happened. His dreams were my dreams - they just weren't high enough quality to suit me."
Of Wood's directorial style, Vampira once noted that "Ed never started with a master design. He grabbed what was handy, then stuck it onto something else that was available, and so it grew." Wood's friends assert that the writer/director/producer and sometime actor always did the best he could, but thanks to a near-terminal lack of funds, his movies never really had a chance.
Wood's early relationships were similarly troubled, although he was clearly attracted to, and attractive to, women. "He admired women and liked to be around them," commented Brooks, "but sometimes he wanted to be one of them". When Dolores Fuller left him for a life of adventure and self-improvement in the Big Apple, Wood quickly married Norma McCarty. Fuller remembers that this marriage "...only lasted a few weeks. The minute she found out that he was a transvestite she couldn't handle it, and then Ed met Kathy O'Hara," who became his second wife, and remained with him until the day he died.
Wood managed to scrape together a living as a filmmaker all though the Fifties, shooting whenever he could raise enough cash, often agreeing to ludicrous demands from his backers in exchange for their financial support. Perhaps the most famous example of this was when Wood managed to secure funds from a Baptist church for his proposed epic, Grave Robbers From Outer Space, on the condition that he change the sacrilegious-sounding title to Plan 9 From Outer Space and get himself and cast member Tor Johnson baptised in a swimming pool before production began. The Baptists had hoped to be able to make a series of biblical features with the profits made from Plan 9 From Outer Space, but as with all of Wood's features, there weren't enough profits to pay the bus fare home from the cinema.
The Fifties had come and gone. Wood's dream of being another Orson Welles had died a flaming death, and throughout the Sixties he made his living writing pornographic novels and even directing a couple of skin flicks. From time to time, Wood was given the chance to write something closer to his heart, but his decline was in full swing and, after being evicted from one apartment after another, Wood and Kathy finally moved in with friends, where shortly afterwards he died in front of the TV, watching a football game in 1978.
Ed Wood was down, but most certainly not out. In 1980, brothers Harry and Michael Medved wrote the best-selling book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which Ed Wood was named Worst Director of All Time, and Plan 9 From Outer Space was voted Worst Film of All Time. Then in 1994, Tim Burton's stylish, Oscar-winning biopic Ed Wood immortalised the man himself in all his lunatic glory.
Finally, then, Ed was a star, a mad scientist of the movies revered throughout the world for his films' clunky dialogue, rubbery monsters, cheesy actors and playschool sets. Good movies are, after all, a dime a dozen, but an honest-to-goodness turkey is hard to find.
Dolores Fuller puts it best, and so gets the final word. "Eddie was unique. You can't compare him with other directors who had more money to do their pictures correctly. At least Eddie had ideas in his pictures."
Are you a fan of films so bad, they’re good? What’s your all-time favourite turkey?
Born to be Bad