Ed Wood

Screening: 11 July, 6:30pm

USA
1994

Director: Tim Burton
Production co: Touchstone Pictures
Producers: Tim Burton, Denise Di Novi
Screenplay: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski. Based on the book Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey
Cinematography: Stefan Czapsky
Editor: Chris Lebenzon
Production designer: Tom Duffield
Music: Howard Shore
Ed Wood: Johnny Depp
Bela Lugosi: Martin Landau
Dolores Fuller: Sarah Jessica Parker
Kathy O'Hara: Patricia Arquette
Criswell: Jeffrey Jones
Reverend Lemon: G.D. Spradlin
Orson Welles: Vincent D'Onofrio
Bunny Breckinridge: Bill Murray
Georgie Weiss: Mike Star
Paul Marco: Max Casella
Conrad Brooks: Brent Hinckley
Vampira: Lisa Marie
Tor Johnson: George Steel
127 mins
B&W
16mm (4:3)
M cert

Famed as the worst director of all time, Edward D. Wood Jr. was a distinctly American phenomenon a schlock visionary. That Wood's movies were bad is not really a subject of debate; they were extravagantly, often inexplicably bad. But that this bottom-of-the-barrel auteur never seemed to get wind of his shortcomings is what makes the character here so irresistibly charming.

As Johnny Depp plays him, his greatest gift was a perpetually sunny indifference to the plain facts of real life. After reading about a producer's plans to make a film about Christine Jorgensen's sex change, Wood offers his services, claiming that he is better qualified than anyone else to deal with this subject. Why? Because he likes to wear women's clothes he even parachuted over Germany wearing panties and a bra under his uniform.

Though Burton focuses his story on the hilarious contortions that went into the making of Wood's films, the pivotal relationship in the movie is between Wood and his lifelong hero, Bela Lugosi Now in his seventies and addicted to morphine, Lugosi has been washed up as an actor for years. To Wood, though, he is as big as ever, and though there is absolutely nothing for him to do in his sex change movie which becomes his transvestite movie, Glen or Glenda? he signs him up anyway.

It's impossible to overestimate the job that Landau does here as this sepulchral Hungarian. Both vocally and physically, he's simply astounding. As Burton sees it, Lugosi and Wood were equally good for one another. Lugosi helped Wood sucker backers into financing his disasters, and Wood gave Lugosi a reason to live plus a little cash to buy more dope. But Depp and Landau create a relationship that is far stranger and more tender than one built solely on mutual advantage. Like Depp and Vincent Price in Edward Scissorhands, the actors slip into a moving father-son relationship with Wood shouldering the burden of his ageing parent's deterioration.

As time goes by, the need to bail Lugosi out of one crisis or another becomes the driving force behind Wood's career. Oblivious to rejection, Wood presses on, beating the bushes for cash and creating work for his friend, despite the fact that, in the case of Plan 9 From Outer Space, he is already dead.

Hal Hinson, Washington Post, 7/10/94

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