Ed Wood Extra: What exactly is a "bad" movie, anyway?

Ed Wood faced two clear options in the 1950s.

NOTE: I had intended to continue my coverage of The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen (1999) this week, but I was so bogged down with other projects that I found I did not have sufficient time to do justice to this remarkable compilation video. And so, Part 2 of my series about that film will have to wait until a later date. In the meantime, rather than post nothing at all this week, here's a brief, extemporaneous (read: no research) essay about Ed Wood.

"So bad, it's good!"

Even now, that four-word phrase defines the Ed Wood cult. It's the reason you're here. It's the reason I'm here. It's the reason Eddie's movies are remembered at all. As a society, we have determined that his films, especially the sci-fi/horror ones he made in the 1950s, have attained such a level of technical incompetence that we find them entertaining. Paradoxically, their "badness" makes them "good." So we still watch them and obsess over them, all these decades later. 

Meanwhile, many so-called "good" movies that won awards and received critical praise when they were new have fallen by the wayside. We may still respect them, but we rarely watch them outside of college classrooms. Is this fair? Many critics have argued that it is not. In his book Cult Movies 3 (1988), author Danny Peary begins his essay about Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953) with this observation;

There are so many good, poorly distributed films waiting for discovery that it's somewhat regrettable so much attention has been devoted in recent years to celebrating cinema's clinkers. Particularly annoying are the Medved-spawned "Worst Film Festivals" that are geared to smug "hip" viewers (the equivalent of self-pleasing sports fans who do "the Wave") who think that a mediocre, average, or decent film is awful simply because the sponsors say it's awful, and respond accordingly.

I can remember that, when Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) was first released, several critics groused that a lavish biopic had been made about a man who made such disposable, drive-in junk as Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Shouldn't we be praising the makers of "good" movies instead? 

Actress turned TV writer Joanna Lee (1931-2003), who played Tanna in Plan 9, leveled similar charges at Tim Burton in her scathing 1999 autobiography, A Difficult Woman in Hollywood. For her, Ed Wood was an insult to serious filmmakers and their work. The film's very existence irked her. She also denounced Ed Wood (the person) in no uncertain terms. Her ire is understandable. Lee very much wanted to be remembered for writing such serious, issue-driven fare as Like Normal People (1979), Children of Divorce (1980), and I Want to Keep My Baby! (1976). But instead, she kept getting asked about a cheap, dumb flying saucer movie she'd made in the '50s. Can you blame her for snapping?

(Sidebar: I swear to you, I can remember reading somewhere that Joanna Lee used to be a good sport about Plan 9. For years, she would playfully deny being in the movie when it came up in interviews. By the time she wrote A Difficult Woman, however, her attitude had obviously changed.)

But what do the terms "good" and "bad" even mean, especially when we're talking about movies? Having now done this series for over a decade, those two overused adjectives have come to have less and less significance for me. When you dwell in the upside-down world of Ed Wood for as long as I have, you stop caring about the normal aesthetic standards we typically apply to motion pictures. I left "good" and "bad" in the rearview mirror long ago.

It was not always so. For years, I was a regular attendee of those annual pre-Oscar marathons of Best Picture nominees. As such, I sat through hours and hours of movies that were as close to officially "good" as you can get. Every year, there would be one or two films I found quite entertaining, sometimes even enlightening. But most of the movies were trying too hard to be respectable as they covered serious social issues (poverty, AIDS, alcoholism, domestic abuse, etc.) or significant figures from history. I began to chafe against what John Waters calls "the tyranny of good taste." Eventually, I gave up on those marathons. (And watching the Oscars.)

Nowadays, while I don't necessarily avoid critic-approved movies, I don't seek them out either. If something particular about a film appeals to me—the director, the cast, the subject matter, maybe even the trailer or the poster—I'll watch it. If that same film happens to have a high score on Rotten Tomatoes, great. If not, who really cares? Critics get it wrong sometimes. 

I don't really care about box office results either, since audiences also get it wrong sometimes. It's nice when a movie I enjoy makes enough money to justify its budget, but life doesn't always work out this way. I think it's a grave mistake to dismiss a film solely because it fizzled at the box office. (How often this happens!) You'll miss a lot of worthwhile films this way. On the other hand, there are those high-minded folks who believe that anything popular must be bad because the general public has such lousy taste. I think this is equally wrong. 

Lately, it seems that audiences are demanding something else from the entertainment they consume. It's an intangible quality I call (for lack of a better word) "blendiness," and I think it's slowly but surely suffocating art. We want the movies we watch, the music we listen to, and even the literature we read to blend in seamlessly with the rest of our lives. It shouldn't stick out too much or attract undue attention. I've come to the sad conclusion that many of today's most common pejoratives (weird, creepy, annoying, confusing) are all synonyms for the same thing: noticeable. 

Above all, we want our media to have a sheen of anonymous professionalism. For some reason that eludes me, we need it to have that factory-made, assembly-line, vacuum-sealed-for-freshness quality. Computers have a lot to do with that, I think. CGI and digital photography have permanently changed the way movies and TV shows look. Pro Tools permanently changed the way music sounds. And don't think the written word is immune! Soon enough, thanks to Grammarly and ChatGPT, we'll all be writing in the same exact way and there will be no such thing as a distinct authorial voice anymore. 

So how do Ed Wood's movies fit into all of this? Well, we can forget about critical praise or massive box office success. Those were never in the cards for Eddie. And we can forget about "blendiness," too. His movies definitely stick out. And they don't have that air of bland, anonymous professionalism that characterizes much of modern media. And, yeah, that's a lot of why they still hold such great fascination for me today. I wouldn't say the acting, the writing, or even the special effects are "bad." They're just not in keeping with what we've been conditioned to think is "good."

What's strange and often disheartening to me is that some of Ed Wood's alleged fans don't feel this way. They will tell you that some of Ed's films are too technically inept or too thematically unusual. They prefer the ones that look and sound more like "real movies." I don't get that, and I never will. I always want to tell these people, "If you need coherent plots or elaborate effects, you don't want Ed Wood. You want another director entirely."

Recently, a book about Ed Wood made a suggestion that absolutely floored me. The author theorized that Ed gave the female lead in Bride of the Monster to Loretta King rather than his girlfriend Dolores Fuller simply because Fuller was not a good enough actress and could not have handled the film's dialogue. My immediate reaction to this was: "Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? What even counts as a bad performance in an Ed Wood movie? What standards are you even applying here?" 

My point is, when you watch Ed Wood's movies, you have to say goodbye to your conventional notions of good and bad. Those terms are meaningless and useless. You have to forget what movie critics (at least the respectable ones) have been telling you all your life. You have to forget about the slick, big-budget blockbusters you've been trained to think are good. You have to set aside all that junk or Ed's movies won't be any use to you. I don't mean that you have to abandon your standards altogether. But you have to shut them off  (or mute them) for a couple of hours now and then.

Failing that, you could just give up on Ed Wood and watch the work of more conventional directors. Have you heard about this kid, Stevie Spielberg? I hear he's good.