Originally published November 18, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1096
I am put in mind of the old college try (whichever old college that might happen to be).
What has put me in mind of this is Ed Wood, the film about the 1950s filmmaker who is arguably (or maybe inarguably) the single worst director in the history of cinema.
Beyond Wood’s most notorious creations such as Plan 9 From Outer Space (dubbed in the book The Golden Turkey Awards as the lousiest movie ever), my knowledge of what Wood was like was limited. That might still be the case, since you should always be loath to accept biopics as gospel.
Johnny Depp plays the irrepressible movie man with a combination of Michael J. Fox enthusiasm and Jon Lovitz self-delusion. (When he pronounces that his next film, whatever that might be, will “be even better!” you can be certain of two things: (1) it won’t be, but (2) he believes it will.)
The concept of the film is simple: What if there was a filmmaker who had all the drive and vision of Orson Welles—and none of the talent? Wood rhapsodizes about his idol and even meets him at one point. (It’s a sequence that so perfectly meets story needs that I can only presume it’s fictitious. Then again, considering the off-beat stuff in the this film which is certifiably true, it’s hard to know where to draw the line.)
Oh, sure, there are other aspects to the film—most notably Martin Landau’s performance as a morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi nearing the end of his career—an acting accomplishment that, barring an unexpected supporting appearance by God in a movie sometime in the next two months, pretty much locks up the Best Supporting Actor award at next year’s Oscars.
But it’s Wood’s vision that is the spine of the film, and it’s that vision that we cannot help but wonder about.
What did he see?
Did he realize he had no talent? Or did he, in fact, have some? Was he—to use a popular euphemism—differently abled? I mean, anyone can make a lousy film. Such products are the lifeblood of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But what is it that separates a merely awful film like The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman from the transcendently inept such as Wood’s Bride of the Monster?
What else could it possibly be but vision? Even if it’s cockeyed vision?
When Wood was looking through the lens of a camera, you cannot help but wonder whether he saw his cheesy sets for what they were, his godawful acting coterie for the stiffs that they were. Or when he framed a shot—did he see something else? Did he see something in his mind’s eye that was great and wonderful? That was big-budget and spectacular and as far removed from reality as Wood himself was from Welles? Did he think that his associates were genuinely of professional acting caliber?
There is one moment in the film wherein we actually get to see the world through Wood’s eyes: when Wood stumbles upon a chiropractor and becomes convinced that the hapless back doctor is a dead ringer for the recently deceased Lugosi.
“It’s uncanny,” breathes Wood. And indeed, when see from Wood’s point of view, the resemblance is uncanny. It is only under the harsh reality of the movie lights that we realize that the chiropractor looks about as much like Bela Lugosi as Maggie Thompson does.
Wood had stories to tell, rattling away in his head. Many people do. Unfortunately, most of them lack the creative tools to get those visions on a movie screen. Wood, likewise, lacked the creative tools—but he did have a movie camera and film.
Ed Wood even faithfully covers Wood’s notorious inattention to detail. When a quality film is made, particular care is made to match up shots—to watch out for gaffes and blunders and, wherever possible, correct them. Wood had no such concerns.
Indeed, when Ed Wood director Tim Burton recreates the filming of one of Plan 9‘s graveyard sequences, he shows “Tor Johnson” knocking over a clearly phony headstone. When this is brought to Wood’s attention, he absolutely could not care less. He doesn’t care about such trivialities—to him, his film is a grand canvas, and he’s not going to obsess about every “minor” brush stroke.
My initial impulse was to regard Wood’s cavalier dismissal of such flubs as an indicator of how little Wood cared about his work. But on subsequent consideration, I realized that it isn’t necessarily so different for me. If a novel of mine has a few typos, would I accept readers commenting on those typos as fair and just—or would I quickly get impatient, saying, “Why get hung up on such trivialities?” Indeed, a stellar example of that sort of thinking came when Marvel gave out “No-Prizes.” I read all the mail that’s sent to me via my comic books, but nothing makes me toss aside a letter faster than an opening graph that reads, “I thought the latest issue of Hulk was great, but—it’s No-Prize Time! On page 5, panel 6, the Hulk was miscolored…” and so on.
Ed Wood gives us a portrayal of a guy who pretty much didn’t have a clue—but that didn’t stop him. Because he had vision and dedication and—according to the movie, at least, a fervent belief that he was producing something great.
That is extremely easy to relate to comics, if you merely look at some of the criticism that is hurled in the direction of our little industry.
I often see various computer board pundits or reviewers make pronouncements about comic book creators.
Not about the comics they write. Not about their characterization or their storytelling or their dialoguing. But about the creators themselves.
Specifically, they make comments about the creator’s motivation. They will decide that he’s bored. That he’s hacking it. That perhaps he had talent at one time but no longer does (and indeed, perhaps never did, fooling people until that point through a feat of legerdemain).
That he is, in short, not trying.
At least one sage opined that a major comic book company which shall go nameless (Marvel) was populated by nothing but writers and artists who did not care at all about the work they produced. Instead the aforementioned creative body was merely grinding out garbage, month in, month out, purely to obtain a paycheck.
I’m always amused when someone says that, usually with utter authority. What the observer is really saying, I would guess, is that the work under consideration might not (in the observer’s opinion) be on par with previous work. This is subjective, of course. For example, my opinion of what I consider to be my best work might very well not jibe with the opinions of many of my readers, and vice versa.
But critics pass judgment on motivation and effort as if they were standing next to the creator at the time the work was being produced. As if they were a fly on the wall listening to the creator shaking his head and saying, “Oh, the hëll with it. I don’t really care about this. I’m just gonna hack this out, collect my paycheck, and be done with it.”
I think that every creator has a vision in his head of how something will, or should, turn out. How we judge the final product depends, to some degree, on how close it is to what we saw in our heads. When you’re dealing with an Ed Wood, you’re dealing with someone who is incapable of seeing any shortcomings at all. Whatever he’s seeing in his head, that is likewise what he’s seeing on the screen.
Some of us are a bit more grounded in reality than that. We see that a story might not have worked as well as we wanted it to. That the themes weren’t clear, or the artwork didn’t support it, or it just wasn’t one of the better efforts.
That, however, does not mean—as some would claim—that the creator did not try his best. I’d like to think that every single creator is trying his best, every time out (excepting, of course, those who make a point of holding back if the deal isn’t right). His best may not be very good. It may be hackwork. It may be unimaginative or unconvincing or even flat-out lousy. But it’s his. And it’s better than nothing.
Unless, of course, it really sucks.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, has the answer to the whole jury issue with O. J. Simpson. What you want are jurors who (a) aren’t busy, (b) are rich enough to handle not working for months, and (c) are Simpson’s peers. Easy. Baseball players. After all, it’s not like they’re doing anything important right now.)
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What has put me in mind of this is Ed Wood, the film about the 1950s filmmaker who is arguably (or maybe inarguably) the single worst director in the history of cinema.
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I suspect that decades from now there will NOT be a Uwe Boll film.
If there is a Uwe Boll movie, I hope it is a documentary on how NOT to make movies.
I hope there is. Could be crazy. What other director challenged his detractors to a boxing match?
Nor one about M. Night Syamalaladingdong. Though he certainly rates high up there. Or is that down?
Night has had at least 3 films that are generally liked by a huge number of people, and were very successful. Like him or hate him – he’s not in the same stratus as Boll or Wood.
I was wondering why this particular column was posted, so soon after the big debate of the Spider-Man musical. Perhaps noting a connection?
There may be a stronger connection with Tim Burton. He’s currently remaking his own film Frankenweenie, about a boy who brings his dead dog back to life. (Again, a connection with Spider-Man: TOTD, the resuscitation of a dead dog.) He’s also making a clearly Ed Wood-like live-action version of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I say “clearly” because to the mass audience, that title sounds even sillier than Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the movie, not the series. If you saw these two films on a double bill ten years ago, wouldn’t you think they were both destined for Joel and the Bots to handle?
So I guess I’m asking, Mr. D., was this intentional, accidental, or your subconscious acting to choose this particular BID column to reprint?
I’m the one that schedules the reprints for posting on the site, and any apparent timing coincidences are always just coincidences. If you look at the recently posted columns, you’ll see we’re just posting them twice a week in the order they originally ran in CBG.
Someone once said of Ed Wood that he had genius but no talent and I think that sums it up nicely.
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There’s a certain quality in his films up to The Sinister Urge that let you know right away it’s an Ed Woood film (after that all the passion seems to have been sucked out in an alcoholic haze; the last few movies (with the exception of his uncredited story in THE REVENGE OF DOCTOR X) are joyless hackwork.)
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Wood missed his true calling–he should just have been a producer. He had the ability, and it’s a rare one, to get a movie made. He probably enjoyed the planning more than the execution.
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Yeah. Despite being being called alternately “one of” or “THE” worst films of all time, you can actually see a pretty good storyline in Plan 9 and see the foundations for a really great sci-fi/horror film in what’s there. The same can be said of some of his other films as well. He just wasn’t a great director and he was awful with dialogue.
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“Now, don’t you worry. The saucers are up there. The graveyard is out there. But I’ll be locked up safely in there.”
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But, dámņ, if he had only have been a producer/story writer who could get good script writers and directors on his projects… I honestly think his legacy would have been a series of classic sci-fi/horrors that would have been remembered a lot more fondly by critics and film fans.
The real tragedy is that if he had just held on for another 2 or 3 years he would have lived to see himself become famous. What a hot he would have been at horror movie conventions!
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God…
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Can you imagine what the “Wood & Kaufman Show” would be like at any given convention insane enough to have them both on there?
I have an old issue of Starlog that came out at the time of the film that had an eight page article about Woods career. Two important things that it brought up, was that Ed Wood had a drinking problem that made him unreliable. One producer friend of his said that, if Wood was’nt always drinking and could show that he was reliable, he would of happily given him work. . The other thing was that it was impossible to get all the facts straight, because so-much time had passed and that every-bodys accounts of events were different to each others. The article made reference to a documentary that was made a few years before the film, which was intended to be a time-line of events, but became more of a speculation of Woods life because of all the conflicting stories the director got.
If you read the essay by Danny Perry in his book Cult Movies, he does a (very slightly) tongue in cheek review of Plan 9 which makes that very point – it could be read as a call for disarmament and putting a halt to human folly in the arms race. I never had the pleasure of watching MST3K (except for some tapes a friend sent of Gamera movies) but I’d love to know what they would have made of this or the seminal Glen or Glenda
A couple years ago, the Rifftrax gang did a live riffing of Plan 9. You can find it on DVD. (And should. It’s hilarious.)
I remember later you compared Rob Liefeld to Ed Wood, Peter. You showed a pic of some of his atrocious work on HEROES REBORN:CAPTAIN AMERICA. Just the shockingly bad anatatomy, perspective and basic good drawing skills was like Ed Wood’s work on film. You said Rob probably genuinely loves making comics but doesn’t realize how untalented he is and how horrible his art is. It was actually kind of a sympathetic view of him.
I thought this was the column in which he compared him to Rob. But apparently it isn’t. When was that column, and what was it about? Was it mostly about Rob? It wasn’t the one in which he ran two pages of Rob’s “Heroes Reborn” Cap with MST3000 dialogue, was it?
When was that column, and what was it about? Was it mostly about Rob?
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That’s the column from CBG #1195 (10/11/96), which should show up in about a year. Yes, mostly about Rob.
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It wasn’t the one in which he ran two pages of Rob’s “Heroes Reborn” Cap with MST3000 dialogue, was it?
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No, that’s CBG #1193, two issues prior.
Same here – In a way I’m glad I still have that column to look forward to 🙂
The main difference between the two is that Rob Liefeld actually became hugely successful. I don’t like what that says about the comic book public.
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Well, another difference is that Rob actually worked with the Orson Wells of his field. Those Judgment Day colaborations with Alan Moore were deeply weird. Great script, horrible art.
I think Ed Wood’s problem was that he was so in love with his creations that he reactively refused to see their faults. Sometimes when I’m writing, I’ll see the written words and think that they’re so perfect, they work so well, that any changes would be out of the question. But when people I trust read them and make criticisms — from small changes to sentences or paragraphs not working — I consider their criticism and, more often than not, follow their advice. Ed Wood apparently lacked either the self-editorial ability to see and remove the flaws, or anyone working with him that could convince him everything on film wasn’t perfect.
Also, a few discussions back (on Ariel pointing out the flaw of Catwoman committing a jewelry-based heist in BATMAN) I mentioned (to pretty unanimous approval) the Evil Dictator corollary that TV/movie studios should hire a young child to read/see the work, and if the child could find a logical flaw it would have to be fixed prior to release. Such a child world be working overtime with the works of Ed Wood. (For example, in the opening of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE we’re told that “Future events such as these will affect you in the future.” And about two sentences later we’re told, “And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal.” So these “future events” happened in the past.)
Ya know, in a world where “Battlefield Earth” and “Waterworld” exist, “Plan 9 From Outer Space” can no longer be called the worst film ever made. It’s no longer even the worst SF film ever made.
The weird thing about Plan 9 is that it’s often called the best worst movie. There are lots of movies that are unwatchable, stuff much worse than Battlefield Earth. Plan 9 is notable for the enjoyment that people get out of laughing at it.
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Dude, it was no longer the worst ever made once it was in a world where a film like The Beast of Yucca Flats existed.
I agree with Roger Ebert in that “Waterworld” was a so-and-so movie. It was by no means horrible. It gets this reputation because it cost so much more than it earned, so it “must” be horrible.
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I don’t dispute “Battlefield Earth,” though.
From what I’ve read about Waterworld, part of the reason that it cost so much was because of special effect shot that they could not get to work. It was suppost to be a raging battle between Kevin Costner’s charecter and a giant sea-monster. This was before the wide-scale use of CGI and only two years after Jurrasic Park, where they had a problem with getting the machanical T-Rex to work properly in a scene requiring lots of rain(the goat scene). They tried doing the same thing in Waterworld, except they had the whole ocean to contend with, so in the end the monster only appeard in the film for a few seconds.
The main problem with WATERWORLD is that it made no sense. When you see what the legendary dry land consists of, well, there isn’t that much water on the planet, even if you melted all the ice and converted living tissue to its 90% water. There would have needed to be a honking big ice asteroid come in, which would have wiped out every living thing. Too, they were horribly inconsistent where, in some places the water was miles above original sea level, in others it barely covered the tops of coastal skyscrapers.
That may well have inflated the cost, but the two big problems with the film were (a) as noted, the story made no sense and (b) the hero was largely unsympathetic. He was Mad Max but without anything that would make you remotely on his side.
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Yeah, I’ve seen much worse films than Plan 9. Batman and Robin is the worst film I’ve ever seen – though granted, that’s because I have a comic-book attachment to the source material. (Highlander 3 is the runner-up for worst film for me.)
I have to weigh in on PLAN 9 still being the strongest contender for worst film ever. Yes, BATMAN AND ROBIN was truly horrible — but it didn’t have sudden shifts from day to night, apparently every first take making the final cut (like Tor getting slightly stuck in the doorway), massive script and logic problems (like the one listed above), etc. Horrible as BATMAN AND ROBIN was, at least it was put together correctly (with the arguable exception of the Bat-Nipples — on BatMAN, not BatGIRL), which is something you absolutely can’t say about PLAN 9.
As for the “so bad it’s good” theory, it’s easy to make something bad and difficult but more worth it to make something good. (Bruce Campbell once said, “The movies that are the easiest to make are the hardest to watch.”) I’d rather sit through something good.
That’s a point people often overlook when people engage in hyperbole about how bad a creative work is; there’s a tendency to focus on one aspect and ignore all the other ways it could have been worse. Anyone who’s watched enough MST3K should be able to point to, say, The Phantom Menace and say: “Yes, I had issues with the plot/characters/pacing…but it’s in focus, has actual dialogue rather than voice-over narration because it was filmed without sound, and doesn’t begin with five minutes of a driver’s POV of country roads.” There are whole areas of incompetence that most Hollywood films these days don’t even touch.
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(There’s also a tendency when making these criticisms to engage in shorthand, picking one element and treating it as the whole of what’s wrong with the movie–“Bat-nipples” being a classic case in point. I saw this a lot with Spider-Man 3, where people would say things like “IT SUKS BECAUSE JAZZ DANCE…NUFF SAID” as though it were a well-known principle of film-making that no film with jazz dance could ever be any good.)
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“(Highlander 3 is the runner-up for worst film for me.)
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What, worse than 2? And are you just not counting “The Source” since it was TV/DVD or because you were one of the smart ones who skipped it?
I think Highlander 3 was better than the second one.
As awful as Highlander 2 was – and it is in my list of top (bottom?) worst films, at least it tried to do something different.
What pìššëd me off about Highlander 3 (as I recall – it has been awhile) was that they redid entire bits from the first movie almost beat for beat, going with the rather insulting assumption that if they made something as close as possible to the first film (just with a different villain and beloved victim), audiences would swallow it. That really hacked me off.
I’m not sure if I’m counting the Source or not. There was a direct to DVD one?
2 and 3 are both pretty bad, just in wildly different ways. The Source… well, I don’t think it could have been much worse if they had tried.
What scares me, as a creative person, is that I don’t know if I’m actually a hack. No one does. If everyone around says you stink, you can just say they don’t get it and move on. There are plenty of geniuses that no one understood until after their deaths. But there are also plenty of people who are as bad as everyone says they are.
I think if you care enough to wonder about the question, then you’re not.
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Of course, now we get Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, which aspires to Ed Wood quality, in my opinion, yet he’s making a fortune off of it anyway, due to its infamy. And later this week I intend to watch Birdemic: Shock and Terror, another horrible film rapidly becoming a cult favorite. (Yes, I owe my knowledge of both of these films to RiffTrax.) Wood might have been a much greater success had a lived in a world with an internet.
I have noticed that bad films are far more entertaining than intentionally bad films. Last year I watched Sharktopus on SyFy (Ick, did I really just type that?) and it was really obvious the badness was intentional.
Seventeen years later and I think Ed Wood is still my favorite Tim Burton film.
The people who wrote GOLDEN TURKEY AWARDS wrote a follow-up book (SON OF …) where they admitted the only reason PLAN 9 was awarded the dubious title of World’s Worst was that, well, yes, it was wretched, but also that they hadn’t been able to get their hands on a copy of THE CREEPING TERROR prior to publication. Having seen it, they handily awarded the title to this latter. Having seen both, I agree. How bad was it? They couldn’t even afford pie plates for the alien ship. An early scene shows a super-advanced intergalactic alien ship crashing on Earth … by taking stock footage of an Atlas rocket taking off, and running it backwards. I’m NOT making this UP, you know.
And then there’s the part where the aforementioned terror is munching on some helpless civilians, but can’t quite get its mouth around them, so they help by crawling in.
Or the fact the producer lost the entire soundtrack for soem reason, so he had to narrate the entire storyline and say the lines of all the actors…
The same thing happened to MONSTER A-GO-GO which, in my humble opinion, makes THE CREEPING TERROR look like INCEPTION. It has possibly the greatest ending in movie history, from a “OK, how the hëll do we end this thing” standpoint. I’ve always thought that most sketches would benefit from just having random safes fall out of the sky and crushing the actors once the jokes had run their course and MONSTER A-GO-GO pretty much does the same, only they could not afford safes. Or actors. Or even shots of the sky.
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Herschel Gordon Lewis made some of the most wretched horror movies in history and even HE was too embarrassed to take credit for his contributions to this one. Seek it out all costs.
The A-GO-GO one is doubtless very bad. Awful, even, but what other film financed itself, at least in part, the way CREEPING TERROR did? They had a flatbed truck drive slowly through the town where it ewas being shot. On the backi, the shag carpet which people were supposed to believe was an alien monster, plus a sign which read “If you want to be in a movie, go to … ” And when people showed up the next day, they were informed they could be extras for $25 each.
I have never seen Ed Wood the movie or any film from Ed Wood. I remember the trailers from when the Burton’s movie first came out. I am ashame to say that I thought Ed Wood (the man) was a movie genius until two days ago when I read this review. Why else would thay make a movie about him? Now I know.
Edit:
…Why else would THEY make a movie about him?…
Wouldn’t it be interesting if someone decided to remake “Plan 9?” I mean, people are saying there’s a fairly decent plot buried in there. What if someone gave it a serious rewrite, a decent budget and good actors?
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I mean, sometimes you hear about remakes planned and you find yourself saying, “Why are they DOING this? They got it right the first time!” Remake a film that was terrible the first time out and see if you can make a good version this time.
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Actually, it’s being done, or at least there is an effort to do it underway.
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At Horrorfind last year the folks behind it were showing a teaser trailer that had some serious potential–Criswell or someone doing a Criswell imitation, was speaking over the radio as we see scenes of zombie apocalypse in the streets.
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Thje idea of aliens reanimating the dead to destroy civilization certainly has potential and hey, maybe the aliens got the idea from monitoring our TV and film production, which would give one the impression that a zombie epidemic was the number one fear most people have.
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Which is why the plan is doomed to failure–we’ve had time to reflect and prepare. What they SHOULD do is something so terrible and unexpected that we would never see it coming–venomous ducks, perfect example.
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Stop showing off your faster typing skills, Mulligan!
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Criswell is in fact horror host Mr. Lobo. That’s actually how I first found out about it. Mr. Lobo was on Count Gore De Vol’s show to co-host a showing of the original Plan 9 from Outer Space and discuss the remake that they were working on. You can actually find the podcast of the show still in iTunes under Count Gore’s free podcasts.
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There’s at least one remake being made now. I’m a bit iffy on it though.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJh-gdpJxJo
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http://www.plan9movie.com/trailer.html
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Not sure they’re ever going to get the thing finished at this point.
How hard could it be to remake Plan 9???
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I have a lot of sympathy for the trials and tribulations of indie filmmaking but man, it would really suck to have to admit you couldn’t make a Plan 9 movie.
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And I guess that’s what makes Ed Wood a character worthy of respect above and beyond his actual talent–he got the job done. Badly, yes, but he got it done.
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Anyway, I wish the filmmakers the best, though if it all falls apart I’d be tempted to do it myself. Who owns the rights to the script, I wonder? I know the film itself is public domain but the leaglities of all this are confusing.
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To do it these days and try to get access to police vehicles and military vehicles? Depends on the budget I would assume. But my comment about it maybe not getting finished at this point is because they were talking like they had started filming quite a while ago and then news on the thing that I was hearing just about stopped dead.
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Now their official site shows that filming is due to start later this year. I quote –
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“Plan 9 Auditions!
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Darkstone Entertainment is having its auditions for the feature film “PLAN 9” (The “Plan 9 From Outer Space” Remake) shooting in Roanoke, Virginia from March 20th through April 20th!
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They are casting paid and non paid roles as well as SAG and non SAG players.”
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So it kinda makes me wonder what was up before since this is the one I was hearing about before.
Interestingly enough, Michael Caine said the same thing a year or so before he did the Get Carter remake.
Sorry, my comment is directed to Peter not you Jerry.
Actually Peter, that was the reasoning behind the remake of Bedazzled. They thought the original wasn’t that great, so why not remake it?
And the results was that they made a worse movie than the original. Really. Really worse.
TAC
IMHO one film that should have not been remade was “THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL” Keanu Reeves performance was so terrible. But the whole movie was terrible. Michael Rennie must have been spinning in his grave seeing his character so pitifully displayed. After watching the remake my family and I watched the original. There was no comparision as far as enjoyability was concerned. The remake didn’t end it just stopped. Similarly as my respect for attempted remakes. I enjoy many remakes. But this one should have been left alone. I guess the positive was we chose to watch the original I had viewed as a child and could see our children delight in it. ’nuff said.