This movie portrays Wood as an energetic, ambitious, idealistic young filmmaker who fails due to his wide-eyed optimism. In reality, I cant find much that supports this. I’ve instead read that Wood was very corporate and didn’t care about his productions as near as much as this movie shows. Not to mention, Wood became a porn director after Plan 9. I don’t really buy some idealistic filmmaker resorting to porn within the span of a single year.
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Wood was usually working with little to no budget, and with borrowed (or stolen) equipment, so speed was of the essence.share
As such, if a scene didn’t look right after it was shot, it was still kept in the film. The actors essentially had one take to get it right and, if they didn’t, it was no big deal.
And the whole lack of money thing shows. You can tell the “airplane” is just a room with a sheet thrown over the door to make it look like a curtain. The flying saucers in “Plan 9” were paper plates painted silver because metal pie pans would have been too expensive.
There are glaring continuity errors, often due to his failure to be clear to film processors to process film shot in daylight by a process that makes it look like it’s night out.
Actors were often just local personalities (Vampira, Tor Johnson and Criswell were well known in Los Angeles) but none of them had any acting talent to speak of. Johnson, for example, spoke with a distinct accent so he spoke as little as possible. The rest of the cast was just filled with his friends.
He wrote all his own screenplays, but he had no ear for dialogue so you get winners like this:
“You humans with your simple minds! You’re so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
This is not meant to be a historically accurate version of the real Ed Wood. This was highly fictionalized for laughs.
shareI DOUBT IT...I MEAN THIS IS ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITE FILMS AND THE LUGOSI/WOOD RELATIONSHIP IS SO AMAZING,BUT...I SERIOUSLY DOUBT MUCH OF THE HUMAN STUFF IS REAL TO LIFE.
shareWood never made much money from his movies. Much of Ed Wood is fictional, but the way it shows him raising funds is fairly accurate. I've never come across much that he was a real corporate, calculating type at all.
Now Herschell Gordon Lewis, another low budget movie maker, really was. His field was actually marketing, and he really made his movies based on what he thought would sell.
Not sure if he’s “corporate” but yes, this is a highly fantastical viewing of Edward D Wood Jr. This “aw shucks” happy-go-lucky depiction of the man is really not true, in reality he was actually just incredibly lazy and reportedly quite sleazy and egomaniacal. Like you said, a real artist wouldn’t have resulted to a career in pornos after just a few films. Imagine if another “passionate director”like, say, Tarantino, started making Z-grade direct-to-DVD porno flicks. He wouldn’t. Why? Because he cared about film too much. Wood would not have resorted to porno flicks had he actually cared about cinema as an artform like this film claims he did.
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