'Ed Wood': "These movies are terrible!"
Let me start by saying that Tim Burton is a very strange man. When the same themes start cropping up in a majority of his movies we can draw some conclusions about the man - his characters are often misunderstood outsiders, with issues with their dads. The gothic surrealism lens that he uses to distort almost every story he tells is fresh and different. Ed Wood (1994) is stranger still. Lots of the things that we might expect from Burton are absent and the focus on the main man himself - real-life fifties film maker Ed Wood - is much more compassionate and sympathetic. He is definitely an outsider though, and his little collection of misfits makes it clear that Burton cannot escape all of his patterns.
Ed Wood is on Disney+ right now, and came to me heavily recommended by a pile of internet creeps who all seemed to defensively assure that “Yeah, it’s black and white, but it’s so good.” I always knew I would watch it eventually but I had thought that it might hover miserably at the bottom of my watchlist perpetually, like it was waiting for a train in the rain. Maybe it was the black-and-white format that made me assume that the film would be tragic, or dull, or even pretentious. But the film is more than it appears. It is part comedy, part biopic. If you haven’t heard of Ed Wood he was a writer, director and actor who infamously made the film Plan 9 from Outer Space which has a cult following as ‘the worst film ever made’. Like Burton, he was a very strange man; I think Johnny Depp does an incredible job playing the eccentric and this is my favourite performance I have ever seen him in. The film recounts the period in Wood’s life when he had completed his first pictures and was essentially blacklisted in Hollywood until meeting and befriending Bela Lugosi (the man famous for his iconic depiction of Dracula and other classic horror monsters). The pair have incredible chemistry and the quippy writing is phenomenal. Every character is strange and uncomfortable but they all stay so loveable and watching them all on-screen is so satisfying. The writer of the film, Larry Karaszewski, would later go on to develop the TV series American Crime Story, which I recently finished the OJ Simpson season of, and actually wrote some of my personal favourite episodes.
The outlook of Ed Wood himself lends the whole movie an upbeat optimism that is infectious. “Really? The worst film you ever saw?” he asks a screaming executive on the phone, before assuring him, “Well… My next one will be better!” The whole collection of strangers that Wood collects to complete his film are less of a found family and more of a team that are on a mission to complete something that, in their eyes, will be amazing and finally represent them all. The more sane characters, like Ed Wood’s girlfriend Dolores (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), are framed as villains for pointing out the truth to the delusional misfits; “you’re wasting your life making shit, nobody cares, these movies are terrible”. But realism has no place in the optimistic and naive world that Ed inhabits. The aesthetic of incredibly low budget filmmaking is charming and the film itself could serve as a warning to anybody who wants to film a movie of any kind - you DO need another take for protection.
There are some performances that are sidelined a little. Martin Landau does a heartbreaking job as an aged Bela Lugosi in the twilight of his career and addicted to heroin, and watching him slowly recover his passion for horror through Ed Wood is moving despite the constant sarcasm that the film gives off. Lugosi also loses his temper consistently and screams about Boris Karloff and how overrated the Frankenstein actor is. Understandably, Landau won an Oscar for his supporting role here. Bill Murray also delivers as Bunny Breckinridge, the character who got the most consistent laughs out of me and who I think best exemplifies the attitude the whole film has to its subjects. He plays a gay man who is considering becoming a woman. Beautifully though, despite the film being set in the fifties, Bunny’s sexuality and gender are never the butt of the joke. Instead, his oddly loud and proud demeanour about the whole thing makes those around him uncomfortable and upset and makes the normal seem pathetic and laughable. Shouting “goodbye penis” in the middle of a packed audience shows Bunny’s almost unnerving openness about the whole situation as well as giving us some hilarious reaction shots.
In this, we can see Tim Burton’s feelings towards Bunny, Ed Wood, Bela Lugosi: the whole merry gang. They are oddballs and outcasts, certainly. But they are never to be underestimated or to be mocked. And if you don’t like what they create, then they will do better next time and the time after and the time after that. Tim Burton has never felt better.
Go and watch Ed Wood now on Disney+ ! Let me know what you think over on Twitter @pastadeficit and maybe I'll write a little bit more about Mr Burton.