As a lot of people have written, Wood had a love for the movies that really shows. Despite what you may have heard, Plan 9 is definitely NOT the worst film ever made. It stinks, but it really has heart.
I have always found it inexplicable that he is best known for Plan 9. Having seen most of his films the true gem is “Glen or Glenda”. It is one of the strangest, most wonderful films ever made and is absolutely the one Ed Wood film you should watch.
The other great thing about Wood is that he wrote pulp soft core novels with little nuggets of hard dames and men who cross dress. I own a few of them and if you know the pseudonyms he used you might find them in a used book store.
No doubt on all counts.
I dearly want a copy of Let Me Die In Drag!
According to online critics, a film a friend of mine made is the worst film ever made.
Film Threat kind of liked it (and they got the Godard references), and it got a good review in Christian Science Monitor. But most reviews were like this:
George weiss asks him this question( in Tim burton movie) when wood told him of his cross dressing habit .
What did fruit mean ? A homosexual ?
Yes, that’s what he meant.
EDIT: Here’s the pertinent dialogue.
ED: I like to dress in women’s clothing.
GEORGIE: Are you a fruit?
ED: No, no, not at all! I love women. Wearing their clothes makes me feel closer to them.
GEORGIE: So you’re not a fruit?
ED: Nah, I’m all man. I even fought in WW2. ‘Course, I was wearing ladies’ undergarments under my uniform.
.
Thanx !
Yeah, but 30 years after your death who’s gonna start a thread about you?
Yeah ! I agree .
I’m not sure about the other films, but according to Nightmare of Ecstasy PLAN 9 eventually turned a profit after it was sold for TV. (It used to air a good bit on late night.) One of the investors was Criswell- not for a lot, but a few hundred dollars, and he made his money back; Ed never made anything because he had no points in it.
A surprising thing to me was learning that Bunny Breckenridge (aka John C. Breckenridge IV) was a multimillionaire from inheritance. The Burton movie took a lot of liberties of course but one of the major ones was the Bunny-Wood friendship- they in fact barely knew each other and Breckenridge did PLAN 9 as a lark for a mutual friend of his and Wood’s; if Ed had any idea how rich he was I’m guessing he changed his phone number fast. (The real Breckenridge was divorced from a French woman who had a thousand year old title [that had been purchased] that passed to his daughter, who was amazingly okay with his [never realized] plans for a sex change; this was in articles released at the time and when Breckenridge died a few years back.)
I was actually somewhat disappointed when I watched Wood’s films. Oh, they’re not very good at all, tis true, but they’re also not really in the “so bad they’re good” quality- they’re just really low budget amateurish fumblings, but as far as quality of the writing and acting goes- I’ve seen worse with both. To me for something to rate as truly awful it had to have the potential to be good- ARMAGEDDON for example, or INDEPENDENCE DAY, or PEARL HARBOR or several other huge budget movies that actually made money but had an army of talent and a budget larger than most 2nd world GDPs but had just absolutely horrible writing and acting and plot holes.
If Ed Wood had a Michael Bay budget it probably wouldn’t have been any worse than PEARL HARBOR.
More trivia: Lugosi’s co-stars interviewed at the time of the movie said their number 1 complaint about Landau/Burton was that Bela would never have used profanity around women. He was very old school about ladies. They said the portion that really nailed him and made them moist eyed- because they remembered the incident very well and he was devastated- was his disastrous appearance on the live TV show when the host (in real life Red Skelton) completely threw him off by ad libbing. While Skelton had no way of knowing Lugosi was a drug addict he couldn’t not have known he was old, feeble, a film and stage script background, and was not a native English speaker (didn’t speak it at all until he was an adult) and thus not surprisingly didn’t do improv very well (plus even Robin Williams has off-moments- a lot less of his stuff is ad lib than many realize). They said they never forgave Skelton because he was such a jerk to Lugosi when he got tripped up.
That was the key scene in the movie. And the answer to this thread, when Welles says, “Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”
Great scene from a great movie.
Wrong movie. That’s the accounting they used in The Producers 
Oh, I strongly disagree. I’d rather watch Plan 9 or Bride of the Monster than Pearl Harbor. Slickness with no soul is just boring. Horrible but sincere efforts are entertaining on a couple of levels.
I mean really, does it get better than a ‘cockpit’ that’s just a set of shiny curtains behind the actors, where the ‘stewardess’ has to go to great pains coming through so we can’t see what’s behind her (and so she doesn’t disturb the curtains to the outer edge)?
I’m not generally a fan of “so bad they’re good movies.” Whenever I get cajoled into watching one, I find myself thinking we could just as easily be watching a “so good it’s great movie.” I usually end up bored at best or feeling sad for everyone involved at worst.
But Plan 9… is different. There’s something so charming about its giddy incompetence. As with most things related to the arts (and yes, it is at least related to art), I don’t think an argument is going to convince people who don’t feel the same way about it, but it’s one of the few unquestionably bad movies I actually enjoy watching. (But doesn’t that make it a good movie? Shut up. You’ll ruin it.)
One thing I think youngsters may not appreciate is that feature-length films used to be really, really expensive to make. The price of film stock alone was prohibitive for most enthusiasts. You actually had to convince other people to gamble their money - lots of it ($60,000 is ultra-low budget, but it’s not chump change for most people even today, much less 1959). Once made, you had to compete with thousands of other films to even get it into theaters. So when people saw a movie, they expected a certain level of competence. Oh, the directing, screenwriting, and acting might be crap, but at least the sets weren’t going to fall over.
Now that any rube with a cheap camcorder and a laptop computer can shoot, edit, and distribute his own disasterpiece, all expectations are out the window. For any one of the well-known contenders for the title of “worst-movie ever made,” there are a hundred direct-to-DVD releases that are worse, and far less enjoyable. (And I’ve been in at least one of them.)
What could have been the average per movie salary of Ed Wood ? I am curious .
Charming is a good word for it. It’s a very watchable “bad” movie. It’s a successful work of entertainment. It entertains. To me, a real “bad” movie is something like “The Prince of Tides.” It’s by-the-book professional with top talent all through it, but not entertaining at all or enlightening or anything really. To me.
I use that one from a long list of choices only because my wife watches it a lot. To her it’s a good movie.
It’s a world of both shadow and stone.
Boris Karloff made a few appearances with Red Skelton (I remember an old “Honeymooners” episode where Ralph Kramden says, “Boris Karloff seems like a nice guy when he’s singing and dancing with Red Skelton, but did you ever see ‘Frankenstein’? THAT’S the real Boris Karloff.”), which MAY be why Skelton thought it would be fun to have Lugosi on.
I read Karloff’s autobiography years ago, and he said Lugosi was a fine actor whose biggest fault was that he never learned English well enough to branch out and do different types of roles. Karloff himself, of course, had to do some cheesey roles to pay the bills, but he was always working right up to the day he died.