"An Ed Wood film without at least one angora sweater can only mean that the director himself was wearing it, probably over a pink brassier. Like many geniuses, Ed's success and failure, his failure at success and his enourmous success as a failure, can be attributed partly to his mother. Lillian Wood of Poughskeepie, NY, must have had big plans for her son, Ed Jr. She dressed him up like a girl until he was old enough to encourage comment. This just may have been the reason for her sons' later fascination with the feminine wardrobe. Certainly it prepared him for Hollywood.
From the age of four or five, Ed Jr. showed an interest in film, running around the neighbourhood, often in a dress, taking pictures. Later he began writing screenplays and making films with the local kids. He spent all his time at the movies, his favourite films were westerns, later on he was to form a country & western band called 'Ed Wood's splinters'.
Ed sure was a fancy dresser, but he was no slouch in the hetero department. Six months after Pearl Harbour, he enlisted into the marines, where he earned drawerfulls of medals, and wore the obligatory pink underwear under his battle fatigues. Wood himself was injured, losing his front teeth to a rifle butt, ant taking several bullets in the leg. When he left the marines our hero took up with a carnival heading for California. By 1946 Ed Wood had reached Hollywood. By 1948 he'd written, produced, directed and performed in his first big failure, a stage play, 'The casual company'. Casual company was a subject close to Ed's heart, he was a handsome man, and any pretty woman was at risk, particularly if she was wearing a fluffy angora sweater. That sweater would soon be off. An on to Ed. In fact, the duration of Ed's relationships were often dictated by how long a woman could stand having her clothes stretched all out of shape. The marriage to Norma McCarthy lasted only one nightgown.
Fluffed his way into the Hollywood set, he hawked his material around until finally in 1952 his first feature film, the semiautobiographical 'Glen or Glenda', starring himself and Bela Lugosi hit the screens. Ed didn't care that Lugosi was known only as a horror film actor, he wanted a name. Lugosi, cruelly and unfairly dropped by Hollywood went on to star in other Ed Wood epics, most notably 'Plan 9 from outer space', which began production some five months after his death, without ever receiving much in the way of pay. In fact only one of Ed's movies, 'Bride of the monster' made money. Unfortunately, Ed had sold in excess of 100% of the film to backers.
But what he lacked in business sense, Ed more than made up for in sheer enthusiasm. And boy could this guy write! Rumour has it that could type faster drunk than most men could sober. In fact that's mostly how he did type. How else could you explain 'Plan 9 from outer space'?, or 'The bride and the beast'?, or any Ed Wood film?
Ed Wood lived to make movies, he was never in the business to make money. And he was an original. If his early films had been financially successful, perhaps his subsequent projects would have benefitted from the polish that money brings and would have elevated him to serious movie director status, with the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by his more fortunate contemporaries. But it is us who would be poorer. We may never have got to see all these wildly inventive, mad, bad and dangerously funny films.
Ed Wood died in 1978 aged only 53, an alcoholic with many projects still in his mind and in his battered briefcase. He never tasted real success, but had a hell of a good time making these films, and we guarantee you'll have a hell of a good time watching them!"
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