Ed Wood II

Published May 23, 2022, 7:01 AM

We continue our deep dive in the life and work of director Ed Wood with an exploration of Wood's later years and his posthumous rise to fame. Then the hosts of Ephemeral sit down together to geek out about their favorite Wood films.

Ephemeral is a production of five heart three D audio. For full exposure, listen with that phones. The last night I saw a flying obdue they couldn't have possibly been from this planet. But I can't say a word. A muzzled by Amy Brass, I can't even min I saw that they On the last episode of Ephemeral, we explored the illustrious career of filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr. We looked at Wood's most famous films, including Plan Nine from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, and we debated the inherent quality of Wood's output and how much that even matters. Here. Our producer Trevor Young picks up the story. Edward filmed Plan nine from Outer Space in nineteen fifty six, but I wouldn't premiere until three years later in nineteen fifty nine. In the meantime, Wood directed my personal favorite of his Night of the Ghouls. Through my powers of the supernatural, I and I alone can bring him to this room tonight, from that place in the deep blackness of death from which no visitors to return, where the sun is seen to rise, the sun is seen to set, where the gracious Moon comes from the east and its long journey across the night sky to the west Wingate Foster, through the powers of doctor Actula, will again be permitted to walk. Here's Bill Shoot, author and professor of English at San Antonio College. In some ways, the companion piece to Plan nine, Night of the Ghouls is even more surreal, though it's not as well known because it did not get a theatrical release. It wasn't released until the VHS era in the eighties. When my children were young, I had the VHS tape of that and they requested to watch it over and over again when they were like ten years old, and I think my children have watched it ten or fifteen times. The story behind that film's delayed release is an interesting one. Apparently, Edward had failed to pay the laboratory that developed the negatives for the film, so the laboratory stowed the film away until Edward paid the fees, but he never did so it sat in a warehouse for twenty five years until super fan Wade Williams paid the bill himself and released the movie on VHS tape into Despite the issues with that film, Edward carried on and kept writing scripts. In nineteen sixty Wood wrote and directed The Sinister Urge. Well, what's happened now? Least rated Jaffee Studio. That again they picked up Lila, Sally, Carol Jaffee, the whole crowd who took them Our old friend, Lieutenant Matt Carson. Oh boy, something's going to have to be done about him. As we move into the nineteen sixties, he did direct The Sinister Urge, which is a kind of sex crime oriented film. It's really an early kind of slasher film in some ways, although you could only go so far without in ninety two, but it also was a sex exploitation film in that it dealt with as it was called by the police and the film the dirty picture Racket, the smut picture racket. I read in the morning paper where the police departments we signed a special detail to clear up this silly dirty picture business. That was the last I guess we'd say, mainstream film directed by Edwood. This became a big turning point in what's career keeping and to write more exploitation material in the form of both screenplays and novels. As softcore sex films came in in the sixties, he wrote and later directed films of that sort. Orgy of the Dead, based on one of his novels, was a classic. Although he did not direct that, he wrote it. He was on the set and it has a very Edward ambiance to it. Ah, the curiosity of you on the road to ruin? May it ever be so adventurous? It's so frightened? Well, we certainly can't stay here. Come on where in there? It frightens me silly? There's nothing in there to be afraid? Dog? Then then what's that music? That's what I want to find out? And as the sixties moved on, he moved into the sex film and also sex writing fe He in a way was a pioneer of that in that he moved into the hardcore eight millimeter loops. People who are historians of West Coast Horn have pointed out that one of the series that he was involved with, the Swedish Erotica, was a very pioneering series, and Ed directed a number of those loops. Eventually, Wood moved away from directing movies and focused on his adult content. Ed wrote a lot of sex oriented novels and short stories and also non fiction prose, and that's how he paid the bills. There are at least seventy five if not a hundred novels that he wrote, often under pseudonyms, but he kept a record of those works and was proud of those works and gave signed copies of them to friends. And they're quite interesting field for people to read. I don't know that people want to read seventy five of them, but you could easily acquire a handful of them. There's some collections of the short stories that are available, and all of the qualities that people like about his films really are there in his writings. Also, as Edward moved away from filmmaking throughout the sixties and seventies, his personal life also started to change. Here's family friends, Bob Blackburn, who knew Cathy would as widow. They were both alcoholics, and I'm not afraid to say that because it's the honest truth. And even when I knew her, she was still drinking. There's people and their stories that the two of them were kind of like the battling Bickerson's like when they were both in their cups and a little bit trunk, that things would fly and they could get physical at times. Bob tells us that would shift into pornography. Is a double edged sword. He was good at it, and there was money there, but it was also something that would was forced into, largely by his inability to make it in Hollywood as a traditional filmmaker. A lot of people don't realize that Edward was a porn pioneer working for Bernie Bloom for Pendulum Publishing in starting like in the nineteen sixty nine and then his heyday in the early seventies. He was writing the short stories and he was writing the articles. He was also writing some of the editorials. He was writing a lot of the descriptions for the pictorial layouts, you know, for the girls. You know, they had to have a little story or fantasy for the guys presumably who were buying the magazines and the drinking increased, so they because they include Cathy and this, they were kind of in a downward spiral. These years were tough on the Woods. Ed was struggling to find work and money was inconsistent. They moved around a lot. They actually bought a house out in North Hollywood, and once the house was repossessed and their cars got repossessed just because they couldn't make the bills. They had to put a lot of their furniture and personal artifacts and storage. They couldn't pay that that got sold off, So a lot of Ed's memorabilia got sold off, went to a collector, a couple of collectors, and actually ended up being bought about seven or eight years ago by the step nephew of Paul Marco, a guy named Jason in Sulaco who lives here in l A. And he bought what we called the trunk, which had all of ed scrap books and a bunch of memorabilia. I was attempted to a bid on it myself. He went for about thirteen thousand dollars plus the fees plus the ship. Being so but they kind of were always one step ahead of the landlord when they moved into their apartment right up here on Yucka's Street, where they lived for the last four or five years of Ed's life. By December of nineteen seventy eight, they were in arrears of six months worth of rent, and on the morning of December seven, they were forcibly evicted from their apartment they're on at on the street. All their possessions, like file cabinets that Ed had. I heard, you know, rumors of a bail Legosi biography that he was working on called Lugosi Postmortem. That could have been something in there. All they had was a close on their back and a little tiny leather suitcase that held some personal papers. Unfortunately not that manuscript, but they did have the manuscript for Hollywood rat Race, as well as a shooting script for Ed's Pride and Joy called I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, which was a film which actually ended up getting made in the late nineteen nineties, but it never technically released. A friend of theirs, an actor friend of theirs named Peter co said he would come get them and brought them back to his apartment up in North Hollywood, and three days later, on Sunday, the tenth Ed was in a bedroom feeling bad. There's I guess the TV with a football game on, and Kathy and Peter and a couple of other friends were in the living room having drinks, and one of their friends went in the bedroom that had was sleeping in or lane and with the game on, and he had passed away. So she came out and said, Hey, I think Eddie's died. They all went in there to look, and in fact he was, and Cathy said his eyes were open as if he'd seen death. Edward D. Wood Jr. Died on December tenth, and it seemed as though the sad story of Edwood had come to a close. But just a couple of years later, Wood's story would reach millions of new people and he would finally get the fame he desired. For most of his life, Wood's work was somewhat underground or obscure, but after his death he started to gain a little more popularity. Some of this stuff was starting to get known a little bit among collectors, you know, a hardcore cult movie film buffs, video tapes were starting to come in a little bit, maybe just a hair later in early eighties, but there was an underground collector circuit that would, you know, trade here's robot monster. Here, I'll trade you to Edward Films for you know, this streaming sheet creature or whatever. But then came Edward's big break in the Medved Brothers published their book The Golden Turkey Awards, naming ed Wood the worst director and his film Planned nine from Outer Space the worst movie of all time. That one look started that whole ball rolling. I don't think we'd be sitting here talking right now with that book handic and that because I don't think ed ever would have gotten a notoriety that he has, because, for one, the Tim Burton film would never gotten made with that that book. The fame of that medved Brother's book, like the influence of that cannot be underestimated. I would say millions of people watched Plan nine because of that, and that means that it was kind of cemented into the cannon in a way that few other movies happen. That was writer Katherine Coldron, who we talked to last episode. Intentional or not, Edward became a household name almost overnight. Suddenly Edward films were everywhere, movie theaters, video stores, on TV. Here's bill shoot the kind of worst film of all time, Golden Turkey Thing. I was never a fan of that. I never liked the con to say mentioned in that, But I have a feeling that ed Wood was around long enough that he had the attitude that if they spell the name right, any publicity is good publicity. He certainly was a man who had a sense of humor. Am I happy that that happened, Well, if it makes the film is well known, I'm very happy that it happened, And I'm glad that he has been rediscovered. The fact that Edward is famous for making What's you Know? Been called the worst movie of all time. I don't know if that's the legacy that he would have chosen, but I do think that he must be very happy that people have watched his movie in such enormous droves. Kathy always used to say, Eddie would have loved the attention. He would have been out there, he would have been appearing at everything in talking and he would have It would have given him a new hope in a new life. As Bill tells us, the revival was good timing because the eighties saw a huge boom in cult films and physical media collectors. You had fanzines and magazines like Psychotronic Video, Watchdog, The Phantom of the Movies, and many of the other folks of that sort. You had vhs. You had Rhino video with catalogs in hand. I wonder through these sacred decades, be it rock and Roll, Country, Rhythm and Blue Comedy, Children's Fair, or the Unravaged Home Video, Oh Sweet Rhino, Virtuous Rhino, you had the early days of something Weird video, and you had people like Elvira with her television show. Hello darling, it's me Elvira and Mistress of the Dark. That video cutie who makes the boys stand up and Saluti. Well, it's time to reach into the old vault for today's video treasure boy talking about scraping the bottom of the barrel. It smells like a really ripe one. Let's see it's killers from space. Oh yeah, right, well, I'll just stick this where the sun does shine. No, not there in the DCR. I'm sorry that Edward passed away when he did, of course, I'm sorry he passed away at all. But had he lived into the eighties, I have no doubt that he would have thrived in the straight to video market of the eighties. He certainly know how to make a slasher film. The Sinister Urge from the early sixties, with a little more explicit violence and sex and shot in color would have been a perfect low budget slasher film. And some of the straight to video things were made for five thousand dollars during that period. So I think that there are people who admired Edwood, who put a qut of perhaps gotten him set up in that world, and then he could have gotten into the world of the conventions the way that someone like Herschel, Gordon Lewis and Ray Dennis Steckler, these people were able to benefit from the renewed interest in their work. Edward could have had a successful second career during the eighties and nineties had he lived, and who knows what kind of works he could have created there. So I think that's a horrible lost opportunity because of his passing at a relatively young age, and we can just dream about the things he could have created had he lived longer. And it didn't stop there. Here's Bob Blackburn again, and all of a sudden people started discovering a few of his other films like Glennard Linda or Ride to the Monsters, and they started having the college screenings like U c. L A Film school had a screening like an eighty one or eighty two. Now when you're in college, I used to see the Marks Brothers films because that was like in the late sixties orly seventies, like they were screening Duck Soup and Horse Feathers and all because you get high and you go to watch these funny Marks Brothers movies. So they were doing the same thing with this on college campuses, get high and watch Edwood movies, which I'm sure led to the so bad it's good and so that it's hilarious moments because you're stone and you're watching Plan nine and it doesn't make sense, and you're going, well, wait a minute, is that a shower curtain? What? You know? What? What? It's daytime, it's nighttime, it's daytime, it's nighttime. Are those hubcaps? What the heck is that? But I think some people started taking Ed's work a little bit more seriously than that. They started discovering things in it that they went, well, wait a minute, there's more here than what appears on the screen. The more they found out about Ed, the deeper the film's got, and it just kind of snowballed a little bit for people that took a bit of a more serious approach to filmmaking in general. To odd tours had just been called that. One of the Edwards super fans from this period was Rudolph Gray, who wrote an extensive biography called Nightmare of Ecstasy, The Life and Work of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Released in It was the first time that Ed's personal story had been made public and widely available, and it got noticed. Soon a bio pick about Wood's life was in the works at Columbia Pictures. The director was Tim Burton, famous for films like Edward Scissor Hands, Joyce. I just saw a strange did you get a good look at and Beetle Juice? You help me? Look how much you might call Nila? And Okay, I want out for good. In order for me to do that, Hey, I gotta get married. Hey, these are my roles? Come to think of it, I don't have any roles. And Johnny Depp was cast to portray Edwood. Mr Legos, why are you buying a com planning on dying? So? No, that's title of Cities and ten Days. If that's conceivable. Do you know that I saw you performed Dracula into Keepsie. That was a terrible production. I thought it was great. You know you're you're much scarier in real life and you're in the movie. The film was being written by screenwriters Larry Karazowski and Scott Alexander. I recently attended a Q and A with Karazowski at the Secret Movie Club in l A, where he talked about the process. We didn't want to make Edward a figure of of laughter. Uh, nothing's worse than me see a movie about like bad filmmakers and they're they're they're they're purposely trying to make them bad. Befo Wars. Edward was always meant to be a figure of giggles. It was always like the worst filmmaker of all time, the worst film festival of all time, There's all that kind of stuff. Maybe part of it was we had made a film before this is called Problem Child, which got the worst reviews of all time, and so we we we sort of went into the this a little more sympathetically. We're like, what if you don't make fun of that, but celebrate in the weird way and celebrate his passion and celebrate the fact that he actually was a successful filmmaker. He had a vision, he had a passion, and he got that passion up on the screen. That heartfelt story is what attracted Tim Burton. Tim Burton sort of became curious about this movie when it was just just like literally a three page treatment, And when we met with him, we literally just said Ed and bella love story, because for us, that what it was all about, much like the friendship between Bella Legosti and ed Wood. Tim Burton had a father early relationship with Vincent Price. He saw in me a persona of the unreal, somebody who he knew was a guy named Vincent Price, and that intrigued him. He wanted to identify with somebody who was real but unreal, and so the filmmakers agreed on making that place of empathy central to the film. The movie titled ed Wood Premier to you control everyone's fature like the puppet master. So I pull up, Yes, you pull the string, pull the strings. I liked that I was able to ask Larry how accurate they thought Depth's portrayal of Edward really was, and if he was actually as eccentric as he seems in the movie. When you talked to the people who worked with Edwood, they talked about what just he would call him up at one of the Plan nines on you Gotta Get Up. He was always this enthusiastic cheerleader, and obviously he had to be that person, uh, in order to get these I think he made something like nine movies you know, as a director, made because he was just like you know, he created this whole little family of people who she believed in him and he believed in them, and in all fairness, most of these people no one ever believed in them ever, So I don't think we were dishonest in anyway whatsoever. It was he Johnny Depp. I'm not sure he's Johnny Depp, but that being said, one of the best days on the set. This is actually a great story and it kind of relates, kind of doesn't. But um, we were shooting on Hollywood bullets off a Hollywood bull of the Muslim Frank scene. One of our crew members came over. I wasn't even there. One of the crew members came over to Scott and said, there's this woman over there waiting for the bus. And she said she was married to Ed. And Scott was like, what, what the hell and she was She's literally carrying like bottles of boots and things. And it went over and it was Cathy Would. And none of us had met Cathy Would at that point, and so Scott went over and said like Kathy, and she's like yes, yes, and He's like, oh my god, this is going to meet you. I'm Scott Alexander wrote this thing, and you know, like this, You're it's it's it's such any to meet you. And she's like, I'd love to beat Johnny. Can I meet Johnny? And we're like oh, and Scott was just like okay, sure, And so Scott brought over to the set and knocked on Johnny's trailer and Scott came in and said, like, Cathy, what is out there? And it was the day of the Musso scene. So Johnny was like in address and he was makeup, was smeared and all these things. And Johnny was like, I can't go out the meter like this. She's gonna think we're just like making fun of her husband. And then I was like five minutes Johnny come to set and he's like, you know all right, and he opens the door and he walks out and Cathy sees him and she's like, you look just like my Eddie and it says totally was great. And she went home and she came back and she brought Edward's wallet. We had it still had his I D and all these other things and hand the Johnny said like, please keep this and be and and have this in your pocket when you make all those things. So even though it was obviously there's quotation marks all over the things that happened in this movie. His wife recognized it as being like close enough. That is more or less backed up by Bob Blackburn, who has gotten a firsthand account of Ed's personality through Kathy. He was a party kind of guy. He loved having people around when they could afford it. One of their apartments out in North Hollywood had a swimming pool and Edward have pool parties all the time. One of my favorite stories that Kathy told me, and this tracks me up. Ed was taken a bath one day in their North Hollywood apartment and here's a knock or and ring on the doorbell and he so he put to towel and grabs the towel and goes out and opens the doorners a fuller brush salesman there, and Ed cracks up and he goes, hey, I'm right in the middle of a bath. If you want to come in and try and sell me something, I'm willing to listen. And the guy goes, Okay, I know it could make a sale here. So it goes back into the sits in the tub, but the guy sits on the john and they start talking. The guy pulls his brushes out and it grabs one and thrubs his back and stuff and says, hey, you want to drink and a guy yeah, yeah, okay, So it gets a bottle again and they became fast friends. It was that kind of guy that I think you would like. The movie was a critical success and as widely regarded as one of Tim Burton's best films, but perhaps more importantly, it redefined ed Wood for a whole new generation. Here's bill shoot. The Edwood movie was written by two people who are super fans of Edwood. That sort of gave him immortality. Now how do I view the Edwood film? I view it very much like the Buddy Holly Story was to Buddy Holly. They changed things for dramatic license. Composite characters were created. Was it accurate No? Was it six accurate? Maybe? But it was made by people whose heart was in the right place, and the Buddy Holly Story did a great job of getting people interested in Buddy Holly. With Johnny Depp as ed Wood, with the great Martin Landau as Bella Legosi, it was a great film. Was it accurate? No? There are things that were invented for the film. There were parts of his life that were not included but at the end of the day, it was respectful. It got people interested in his work, and if it does that, then I'm glad it exists. And I think so many people got their introduction to Edward through that film. It's still a popular film to day. I don't think Edwood or anyone could have imagined a z Grade George Weiss produced film having the making of that recreated in a multimillion dollar Hollywood movie. There's something mind blowing about that on some level. I guess you never know what will be rediscovered for future generations. Edwood never got to work for Columbia or Allied Artists, but in his death and in his posthumous fame, he is up there now in terms of recognition with the people he admired and he looked up to that were wrongs above him on the ladder. And there's something validating about that. And to me, there's something inspiring that makes me happy and warms my heart about that. To me, this begs the question was what happy with his status as a low budget filmmaker. In his book Hollywood Rat Race, he describes some to stay for Hollywood and the movie business. So how did he feel about his own work. What more might he have wanted for himself. Here's Bill Shoot, followed by Bob Blackburn. Edwood would have loved to have worked for an outfit like American International or Lippert or one of the smaller allied artists. He was always aspiring to that level, and I'm sure he would have been happy to work on that level, to work for Sam Katsman or someone like that. But he was a wrunger to below that. He was a Hollywood outsider. He recognized that and realized that. But no, he would have loved to broken those doors down and been Alfred Hitchcocker, been the orsen Wells that everybody says he would have loved to have been. He would have loved to have the power and the ability to make the movies he wanted to make down the road with the actors that he would have love to have worked with. But he did what he did with what he had, and that, to me is the victory for Edwood, is the fact that yes, he came to Hollywood to make movies, and guish darn it, he did make movies. You know, Over the years, the Edward fandom has only grown, and with the help of the internet, various lost works have been discovered. I have a private Edward Facebook group, and we found out recently that ed had been hired to write a script based on a book biography of Frank Leigh He who was the notiter Dame football coach in the forties. And this guy who was a friend of Frank Lahis had written a biography and somehow had contacted Ed in the mid seventies to write a script based on this. Well this none of us had ever heard of it, but somebody found it in a library at St. Mary's College. It turned out to be actually in Edward script that nobody had never heard about, and there's going to be a book about it. I mean up with the script and some notes about the script by a couple of Edward scholars. I will call them for lack of a better word, but there are people that dive much deeper into Edwood than I do. So it's amazing that a lot of things that Ed wrote or producer did are still coming to light, you know, thirty some plus years, forty years after his death. Bob Blackburn says his online community is hoping to keep the Edward flame alive. I get a lot of these people in there who are just passionate who call themselves Edwood. Oh files because they really dig deep into Ed's history, his work, his friendships, his working relationships. They are the ones that discovered this script, uh in the in this library, they've discovered a couple of novels that went under a different title than what we knew them as a couple of people in there are working on books about Ed. There's a gal who's uh doing a biography that I think focus is a little bit on Ed's spiritual qualities. He's an intriguing person. I mean from just the human standpoint, he was an intriguing guy, and I think people want to get to know who this person was and why he was and his triumphs and especially his failures, you know, because he had both, some more than others. But what drove him where was his creative well that he drew from a lot. Here's a MovieMaker author and was talking about him today, and really Wood's legacy goes further than his own career. In a way, he blazed a trail for future artists to come. I think we should celebrate the ingenuity of the z Grade Poverty Row filmmaker who is like a sleight of hand artist who makes you think you're seeing things you don't actually see, or you see something that represents something larger, and he can't afford to do this something larger. But if you flash it for a second or two, and if you're in the right spirit, it's not a problem. It works. It's ghoulish, or you're afraid of it, or it shocks you, and it does what it needs to do and you move on to the next scene. We need to remember, an Edwood film, most of the time, is instantly recognizable. You watch a minute of it and you know that it was directed by him, or that he wrote it if he did not direct it. So that in itself is a great achievement. How many people can have that said about their work, that it is instantly recognizable. So we need to take our hat off to Edwood for creating works that are still entertaining people decades and decades and decades after they were made, that originally played on the most marginal circuit, but which are known and loved, and which people quote dialogue from today. That is an amazing achievement. And people are writing about him and rediscovering his works and republishing his writings. I hope that in that great film set in the Sky or that modest film set in the Sky, that Edward is aware of the love and appreciation that his work has. All three of us producers on Ephemeral are huge Edward fans in the most sincere way possible. So after this break, we're going to come back and talk about a few of our favorite films. To finish up our deep dive into Edwood, we wanted to step back and have a casual conversation about Woods films. So joining me now are my fellow Ephemeral producers slash hosts X and Alex Williams Tevin. Where did you become acquainted with Edward films? In our family? So bad It's good movies are like the number one way that we communicate with each other as human beings. Yeah, Like if I go home for Christmas, the conversation is mostly just about whatever the new riff tracks stuff is. And we just didn't We just did and watched all these bad movies and make fun of them. Um, but where did it come in in your life? I like would see his stuff like in my local video store growing up. You know, they had like posters and things like that. So I like new about like Plan nine for Matter space, for example, but I never really like watched it. I think like a lot of like fifties sixty genre movies just like didn't appeal to me growing up necessarily. So it was really the Edward biopic. I think the Tim Burton movie in that like kind of piqued my interest. And I think that's like probably true for a lot of people, at least a lot of people in my age bracket. I'm a millennial, and um, I've always loved Tim Burton, so I like love and trust anything he does. But that movie especially just like really blew me away. The first time I saw it. It was just like so different from anything else he's ever done. You know, it was like very much grounded in reality. It was like this very kind of funny, lovable story about a director. And you know, I would like go on to love similar types of movies, like The Disaster Artists, which paints a pretty interesting picture of Tommy Wiz oh something about those kind of like biopic movies are always just great to me. Um, I love that we can take these people who are typically kind of laughed at and culture and like see like the heart behind them and really like come to appreciate them and understand them as people. So anyways, long story short, I loved that movie and so from there I started like actually going back to Edward movies. And at around that same time, I got really into VHS collecting, So I started collecting all these old you know VHS tapes of Wood movies and watching them on my CRT and having a great time with them. So I'd say probably like the last five years, I've been really digging into all the old Edwood movies and coming to actually really like them. So like The Disaster Artist, I think in the Disaster Artists, over the credits they actually show side by side, um, like the scenes that they did in the Disaster Arts movie and the scenes from the room and just to show you how like on the nose they got the costumes and the blocking, the blocking, the blocking enclothes and everything and and plan and um. The ed Wood the Tim Burton biopic or biopic if you will, I think it is super on the money too, I mean the down to like you know, the cardboard um headstones, getting you know, tossled and whatever. Yeah, I mean it's It's pretty incredible. How good of a job they did. If nothing else has just like got you really inspired to like go back and see the original movies. I wish they had done like a side by side. I met somebody on YouTube's done it just like did that exact same thing you were describing from the disaster artist. Do you all have a favorite Edward movie, Trevor, You maybe said that yours this Night of the Ghouls Trumpet, Yeah, something about the trumpet and the silly Seance and the Skelly. I love Skellies, man. I don't know what it is. Um. If I was gonna be honest about which ones I like enjoy an ironically, Um, I actually think like Glennard Glenda is like his best actual film. Like if you're judging it on the merits that we normally do for like a standard film, I'd say Glendard Glenda. Yeah, I think it. Um is like way more sincere. I think the scripting and the subject matter is like a lot more nuanced. You know, it still makes use of a lot of like be your role and other patchworky things, but like whatever, it's like a lot more forgivable in the context. Uh No, I just the the use of Baule in that movie is absolutely bizarre, where it's this, it's this. I agree with you that the narrative has the sincerity of of a cross dressing and it actually Edward actually plays the title character in it, doesn't he So, like Bill shoots said something really interesting and the interview take that kind of took me back that if ed would only made Glennar Glenda, he would still like have a place in the history books. And I don't I don't know. I mean, a few weird things had to transpire for anyone to be talking about Edwood now, I think, But but I don't know that. I was like, Okay, I kind of buy that Bill, Yeah, like Glennard Glenda is a is a completely unique film. But the use of bear roll so it's this, this cross dressing narrative about personal identity, and it's a little far, you know, it's a little far reaching him and and kind of goes all over the place. But then there's Bella le Ghostie as this random narrator figure with bureau footage of buffalo running projected behind him, screaming, just stringing, and so I don't know, I don't know how you fregive something like that. I mean, it's so it's so brilliantly bizarre that your I gruth. I think glennar Glenda is definitely his best one. Like I was watching them, I got to that one like a little bit later on, and I think I'd already watched Plan nine and like Brought of the Monster. I was like, Okay, this was actually a little bit better. That blows him out with Glenn Glenda obviously, Like yeah, like what is Bella leghostie doing there? Like what is his purpose in this movie? He's just there because he has Bella ghost Yeah, Like Brand of the Monster is just like really boring, and it's just kind of like this very stereotypical like fifties horror film type. Yeah, and then like Plan nine is just awful. I mean, start to finish, it's just terrible. So you think Edward got worse and worse and worse, And he got worse, He got worse. His ability to conceptualize a plot, like a plot like a leads to be leads to see yeah, and even really to have a story like this is like the overarching tale of like what's happening? Um is pretty muddled. I can't really think of a movie of his word where the story and the plot come through pride of the monster maybe the most, but even that is very confusing. Yeah, the girl gets like lost slash abducted by like mad scientists who like creates monsters in his lab. He wants to like keeper, and he's like super bitter because he was like ostracized from his community or his country because he wanted to experiment with making a people atomic people, right, And then cops come in and save the girl, kill the dude, and leave. I guess it's pretty straight. And don't don't forget about all the thirst trapping they do, like like slowly the shirt guy's shirt this keeps getting more and more destroyed. I mean it's it's very intentional. So Max, which one is your favorite then? Or I would say Glennard Glenda or I mean it doesn't it doesn't couch as a short, but the final curtains it's it's weird. It is objectively really kind of like creative. There's it's like all done through narration and stuff. It's it's it's really interesting. It's like I feel like those are ones we can see like ed Woods, like really trying to be creative with this stuff. When it's like I guess he was trying to be creative with Plan nine. Just what came out is just yeah, I'll probably say those are my two favorite. I Plan nine, hands down is my favorite. It's one of my favorite UM so bad It's Good films or just like you could call it a genre film of the fifties, but it's barely a genre film because it's so outside the norms of of storytelling. But it's got so many iconic moments to meet. I mean just the opening which he uses in other films, to the opening with Criswell in the casket Bcarly that that is also what's great is Chris wall is a character in UM Night of the Ghouls, right, that is pretty cool, I will say. And his voice is always echoing everyone else's voices norm and this is always going yeah, I mean, you got a point. Their Plan nine, I think is like his most like quotable and easily recognizable, I think for a reason, right like the Grave, very vampire with Tour Johnson as the detective, given the other detectives instructions that you can barely understand vampire having no words, Um the Great Flying Saucer special effects from I think the like lack of continuity or consistency between those things, like how the one guy describes it as like a cigar shaped ship, and then when you actually see it it's like a saucerer. It like looks nothing like a cigar. I love stuff like that because I will say that when it comes to historical accounts, the early ones of UFOs were as cigar shaped. The saucer came later on, so it's like he got his like stories and the plot mixed up. I do like that a fist fight on the ship causes it to blow up and catch on fire. There's nothing, they're just they're just punching each other and the ship catches on fire. It's like in the whole time, it's like you stupid, stupid people. It's like the aliens are supposed to be so sophisticated by all you have to do is just getting a fist fight and their ship blows up. So one interesting question. I guess this is like the bigger philosophical question. I wanted to kind of broach with you too. You know, in the episodes, we have very different opinions about like you know whether it's like okay to sort of suspend disbelief when you're like seeing stuff like that just so you can like authentically genuinely enjoy it. Um, or do you kind of like take this more MST three K approach to it and like is that the way you should enjoy stuff like ed Wood? Um? I'm kind of down the middle, frankly, Like they're just times where it's so just like obviously not good that like you can't help it's just like laugh at it for that reason. But they're like there are other times where like actually just like turn my brain off and like have a fun time watching whatever's on the screen. So I don't really have an answer. I'm just curious what you all think. I think the question is kind of ancient and potentional answerable about um is aesthetic value objective? Like what does it mean if something is good or bad? I don't and I don't really know if there's a way that anything should be enjoyed. I don't think you necessarily need to know anything about Edwood. I don't think you. I think maybe if you had never seen another movie it might help to enjoy. But yeah, I don't know. I mean Um, I call it so bad that it's good, maybe as a little bit of shorthand because they are so difficult to talk about because they're just so different than anything else that's out there. But I mean, I have what I would call very sincere enjoyment. Maybe not from all of them hashtag Nite of the Goals, but like Plan nine, y'all. I have watched probably a dozen times. It's I've used little clips from it in lots of ephemeral episodes because it's in the public domain. Um, and it's just got great lines like in the future, which is where all of us will live someday, in all of us will live the rest of our lives exactly I wish I had memorized. There's been parts in my life where I have really had a lot of stuff memorized from from Plan nine. But yeah, so like that, I would say the enjoyment that I have watching Plan nine. When I slewt Max and I think you were it was Max and Mom and Dad. I saw it in a theatrical simulcast with the riff tracks guys, and it was colorized, and I had never seen a colorized before, and that just took it to the next level. I probaised them Abe at least a dozen times. I would watch it right now. I genuinely enjoy it um and I laughed the whole time. Oh yeah, I mean like I don't know. I was thinking about this, like when we were doing the episode about her Carvey. It's like, you know, Carnival Souls. If you just kind of sit there and watch Carnival Souls, it's not a good movie. I mean what they made it with like twe dollars. Uh. There's like those scenes where it's like the worst time I think of. It's like she's in the doctor's office and he turns around and it's the cool and there's just that long pause and then there's a But it's like I could say I legitimately love that movie after watching it all those times. It's like, I don't know, it's just like dogs point, it's like what is good? What is bad? I don't know. I mean, objectively, if you really want to put it up on this whole grade, it's like, yeah, there's not a single Edward film that's even decent. But at the same time, it's like, you know, I I enjoyed going back and watching a bunch of these, like including the ones like I did not remember how much I enjoyed glennor Glenda despite what that eighteen minute long scene that's just nothing. It's just like almost softcore porn, that's about it. I mean, I don't know, it looked like they needed to get another eighteen minutes into the film. But I'm like, yeah, actually I remember this movie being terrible, and it is terrible, but it's a lot better than I remember it being. And I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed watching all these and I don't know. That's That's what matters to me, is like do I actually enjoy it or not? And I enjoy it wood stuff all the time, especially the colorized Plan nine. So first of all, Her Carvings Carnival Souls is a great film, and I will not accept any slander about that film. I think it's like a a low budget masterpiece frankly, But um, yeah, I guess as far as like the enjoyment thing, I guess like I never want to feel like I'm part of a group of people who are like punching down or like making fun of something that was just kind of like, you know, incompetence. It would feel wrong too, just like crap on somebody just because they don't have like the skills or the money. You know, like if they didn't do a good job at something and they were just like totally pretentious about it, like maybe that I would make fun of them. But you know Edward's case, he was just like had struggles and he was totally sincere in the thing he was wanting to do. And so yeah, I guess I'm just saying I feel like some sense of like guilt at like laughing at the thing he did. Sometimes maybe it's inevitable, but I don't know. I mean, I think there's this interesting phenomenon that there's a jilion pretty extremely dull, low budget genre movies from the fifties and the sixties sci fi and lots of others westerns and and and crime films and whatever. But like there's about a sou I mean, there's gonna be thousands of other sci fi movies that this would, you know, like on paper, like a movie like Plan nine or Bright of the Monster Slash Bright of the Atom would would fit into. And yet you could watch dozens of those without any of them standing out to you. Probably maybe an element here or there, edwards stuff stands out for whatever reason. It's just so it's so very different than any than anybody else's work. Yeah, I know. It's just like there are plenty of movies that are just as bad as Monster, Like you know, there are a ton of movies like that, but that one does stand out. It's something about Edwards style. It's I don't know, it's like how genuine you could tell the people are you know that you tell they're trying, you tell TORR. Johnson is actually really trying to deliver those lines and Plan nine. It's just nobody can understand it. And I don't know, it's like you know that you can you can see a passion and stuff that you know, there's there's a good level of respect that I have, Like, you know, they're badly made movies, but they tried really hard. There are I mean, the craft of filmmaking in them is extremely low. So the lighting, the blocking, the set design, the acting, the writing. Yeah, the craft is very the craft the craft is doesn't demonstrate a whole lot of dexterity. So though, I mean, I think there's like a certain charm to that. And maybe that's just because I grew up as like a a nineties kid in video stores, and there was just like a certain sort of like aesthetic charm I think to like low budget filmmaking. You know, it was like never good, but there was this kind of like fun culture around it, right, Like the kind of sillier a like you know, videotape cover or poster was like the more compelled I felt to be like hell yeah, I want to grab this, you know. Um. And like even today, this kind of like retro culture that kind of glamorizes that sort of like eighties low budget thing is like huge right now. And I think it's huge for a reason, you know, I think, you know, even if it doesn't measure up to like the quality of proper filmmaking, it stands on his own as like its own sort of valuable genre. I think, But well it's worth something like, um, this is maybe a dated reference in a different way, but something like the Grindhouse, the Rebert Rodriguez Quentin Tarantino double feature kind of misses the mark for me, because like I I appreciate, I kind of I don't know, empathize with with the love letter to these maybe like hokier tropes of of older B movies. But it's it's just like a little insincere. Maybe that's the wrong word. It's it's just to make of maybe a little too much polish, you know, the polish to make it look bad doesn't come through in the same way that you know that it doesn't in the original. Yeah, that's another like topic I think is this thing about like camp. You know, camp is usually like unintentionally being bad, usually as a result of being a budget and you can't like fake camp, right, like you can't fake low budget. I don't know, and some people do that, Like I think, um, you know, the certain things like Shark Nado or whatever, like attempts to be bad on purpose and it just comes off being cringe e to me at least, like it just has to be that authentically right, it has to be like a happy mistake where it's not real or it doesn't count, you know. I think Catherine cold Iron's point, Um she brings up Shark Nado. It really resonated with me too. That like the overall impression that you get from him like that is cynicism. And the impression that you get from an Edward movie is kind of like a muddled hopeless optimism. Yeah, and I guess I I opt for the ladder. The ladder seems like more of a good time to me, like a better date, a better night in Yeah. Maybe on that note, than um, I don't know what are you? What do you? Guys? Just like? Favorite things about watching an Edward movie the end, Paul Mark, Paul Marco. He plays the same character over and over again. Kelton, He's like the real Like, oh jeez, why do I gotta go out to the cemetery again. It's the same character. It's like Proud of the Monster, Plan nine and Night of the Goals. It's the exact same character. He's referencing things that's happened in the previous movies and stuff. He's got a really good scene actually in um Night of the Goals. They give him they give him a little bit Night of the Goals, like he actually has some character in that one. Yeah, I think to echo, I think my favorite thing is just the characters that he's able to bring on. I think there's just so many memorable people. I mean, I love Chriswell for how cheesy he is, you know, I love Paul Marco for how silly he is. Yeah, Yeah, I mean obviously towards Johnson for just being like absolutely unhinged all the time. I don't think he ever says well, no, I was gonna say, I don't think he ever says any actual words in any Edward movie. But there's like a short period in Plan nine where he's like a cop at the beginning. It says a couple of lines very badly, but otherwise, like I love that that he's just like constantly screaming. Like Edwards screen direction was just like go out there and grunt and like slap them, and you know, I have a good time, and as a result, I have a good time. So I rewatched the riff tracks Plan nine from out of his Face and it's just like you see every time he hits somebody that movie, it's just like he pats them. Yeah, he's just like open handed. Like I love the Bale of the Ghost See and all of it. I just love Balor the Ghost See, even his little bit in Plan nine and the News when he's replaced by the person that is like a foot taller than him covering their face. Yeah, I love that. They like made a a point to highlight that in the Edward Timburton movie, right, like he just like meets the guy in the diner. He's like, you look just like I mean, like holds the thing up to cover his mouth. I agree. I think bellele ghost. He is another one of those characters who just like really makes it happen. I know you were talking about the pull the strings Stephen Glennar Glenda, but I can't help it. It's great. It's a great scene. It's when it stands at my head, You're just like you sit and you say, what did he How did this end up in this movie? Why are why are these the same film? And it's one of the great mysteries. It's one of the great mysteries that Edward left behind unanswered. I will say another thing that I really do love is it's kind of like the same cast of actors through and through on all the films, because it kind of gives you that feel like it was like, you know, like friends and friends making films together and stuff. Because it's obviously toward Johnson and Paul Marco, but like, uh, you got like Duke Moore is in a bunch of them and stuff. It's just like I like that whole like they were all a team together making these things and doing the best they could, and unfortunately the best they could was Planned nine from Outer Space. I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm glad it happened exactly the way it did. Frankly, I do I do wish that had I don't. I don't know what more of a chance looks like, because he got to make like nine films or something, but he had such a sad ending to his life. Um yeah. I think a couple of people said in the episodes that you know, he probably would have had like a really big, like cult revival potentially like a second wind of a career in the like eighties nineties had he been alive, And I see that as being very true. I think people would have absolutely loved some new Edward stuff in the eighties, you know. I mean they are according to IMDb at least there is an ed Wood film coming Grave rovers from out of Space, which is you know, kind of nine. Yeah, but like there's also like the Firstsaken Western's Crossroad of Avenger, which was that seriously he had worked on for like they made a I don't know an episode out of it in seventeen, so you know, there's still people out there trying to like, you know, I guess preserve it. I mean, I don't know how real all this stuff is, but he's giving credit as a writer on a lot of this stuff. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, Ed's interesting from a point of view of lost media. For sure. I would not be surprised if there are tons and tons of movies and scripts and things like sitting in warehouses that we don't know about that are going to come to light in upcoming years, you know, especially with like the Internet and like the huge like Edwood community online. I would be very surprised if those things don't start surfacing and getting funded somehow or whatever. So last question then, right, the show is called ephemeral. Do you guys own any Edward Ephebora. I feel like we probably have planed nine on VHS. Oh, I think we do. Yeah. I mean by we, I mean the Williams family. My father has a closet full of VHS tapes, and I think probably there's a plan nine VHS. I mean I don't think he has anything else of than that. I mean, I don't think we had brought of the monster, and definitely don't wouldn't have Glenard Glendah. Yeah, I've got some some VHS tapes over there. I think I've got Plan nine right of Monster Glen or Gonda, and I think I actually have the Tim Burton movie on HS as well. But oh so do we you know, the biopic. All of these were just like regular watching for like in our family we would watch stuff like The Blob and like Creature from the Black Lagoon, and like, these are just like movies that we would just watch regularly as a family. And h Edward, especially Planned nine, but the other Edward films too, and the Edward biopic. We're all films that we watched a lot as a family, and we sit around, you know, at the dinner table. I could say something like Edi, make me Goolash, but I don't know how to make Kolash Balat and my favor, my favorite one from that movie. And Martin Landa, I think we won the Oscar for it, and he sure did deserve it because he did such a good job. He brought so much humanity but also so much creepiness to that role. Um and camp is what he's sitting there looking at the TV trying to command the TV and doing this weird thing with his hand, and and Johnny Depp Edwood is like, oh my god, Bella, how do you do that? He's like, you have to boot double jointed Hungarian. My favorite of force is Carlin off Sidekick God Love Sucker. Yeah. Anytime Bella Let's character like cusses or or said some something derogatory about someone else, it's just gold. This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Trevor Young, with producers Max and Alex Williams. Bill Shoot is a writer and professor of English at San Antonio College. He also wrote the introduction for the new book of posthumously released essays by ed Wood When the Topic Is Sex. Bob Blackburn is a family friend of the Woods who edited it and compiled the stories for When the Topic Is Sex, which you can find on bare Manner Media's website or wherever books are sold. And Catherine cold Iron is author of the book Plan nine from Outer Space. See more of her work at k cold Iron dot com. You also heard from screenwriter Larry Karazowski, who co wrote film ed Wood Big. Thanks to the Secret Movie Club in Los Angeles for hosting this Q and A and letting us record. You can check out their calendar at Secret Movie Club dot com. How do you feel about Edwood? Love him, hate him? Tell us why on social media. We're at Ephemeral Show and for more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. If the desert had been above the coffently copingst the business of

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