How could I resist a film that shows Ed Wood building up a circus of freaks around him to make dodgy films? Here we have a cross dresser who collects a discarded horror actor on morphine, an ugly brute of a wrestler who only knows how to grunt, a fortune-teller who admits to being a charlatan and an apathetic spooky-looking lady sacked from a tv show. You couln't make it up could you?
shareI love this movie and I do agree that Wood's "stable of stars" was an.....eclectic bunch, but I think their weirdness was played up a bit. I do mean a bit because most were crazier than a box of frogs.
Tor Johnson was a terrible actor (or at least an actor who was always in terrible films) but was, by all accounts, a very sweet, gentle and intelligent man. I think he was fairly normal.
Bunny Breckinridge and Vampiria were probably nice enough but yeah, they were off center to put it mildly. Criswell was a self proclaimed fake psychic but he was successful for a long time. How he got involved with Wood is still a mystery to me. It's not like he was hard up for work like Bela and Vampiria.
I think Wood's story is actually pretty common. For every Orson Wells or Hitchcock, there are 100 Ed Woods. The Ed Woods of the world are always surrounded by enablers who feed their fantasy of being talented. You have to be somewhat crazy to do that.
Re "How Criswell got involved with Wood is a mystery." I did wonder about that. Criswell seemed to be on top of his game. So he didn't seem to have anything to gain by joining Wood's stable of misfits. It just shows what dodgy charisma Ed Wood must have had. Perhaps Criswell took a perverse delight in somebody he may have seen as a fellow fake. Criswell is certainly an interesting character.
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