Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 242: The House That Ed Built (2019)

Shane Schoeppner directs and stars in The House That Ed Built.

Ed Wood has long served as a patron saint to low-budget filmmakers everywhere. And why shouldn't he? Ed's movies, though the object of widespread ridicule for decades, are as personal and distinctive as those of any of cinema's great auteurs. Plato famously declared books to be "immortal sons defying their sires." Can't the same be said about movies? Eddie died nearly half a century ago, and we're still picking apart the cheap exploitation films he made between 1948 and 1978. Box office grosses, industry awards, and critical praise are nice perks (if you can get them), but I think being remembered tops them all. That is Ed Wood's ultimate vindication, his last laugh.

Making independent films can be a brutal, heartbreaking, frustrating, and even humiliating process. Ed Wood knew all about that. The hours are long, the risk is high, and the rewards can be nonexistent. And yet, if you're determined enough to make a movie of your very own, you'll accept all of that. What choice do you have? I'll recommend two great films to you: John Paizs' comedy Crime Wave (1985) and the documentary American Movie (1999). They're both stories about eccentric independent directors hellbent on making their own movies, perhaps past the point of reason. Neither of those films references Ed Wood, but I'm sure Eddie could have related to them both. His spirit dwells in them.

On the other hand, some low-budget indie directors have made features and shorts directly and unambiguously inspired by the life and career of Edward D. Wood, Jr. I have already covered several examples in this series: Jesse Berger's Glen or the Bride... (2014), Bart Aikens and Scott Allen Nollen's Ed and Bela (1986), and Andre Perkowski's Devil Girls (1999) and The Vampire's Tomb (2013). Some of these I've quite enjoyed, others have been tough to sit through. But, again, I feel Eddie would have appreciated each one of these.

A touching tribute film.

Recently, the redoubtable Bob Blackburn hipped me to another Wood-inspired film: Shane Schoeppner's The House That Ed Built (2019). This is a 21-minute, black-and-white short dramatizing Ed Wood's last days in 1978 as he sinks into end-stage alcoholism, loses his apartment, attempts to reconnect with people from his past, and struggles vainly to get one last film made. The director plays Ed himself, in addition to writing the screenplay and performing any number of duties behind the scenes. The House is manifestly a passion project for Schoeppner, but what's remarkable here is that he managed to make a compelling and visually interesting film with such limited resources.

Thematically, The House has a lot in common with Ed and Bela—they're even roughly the same length—but it's much more polished than that film. While Ed and Bela was shot with a consumer-grade camcorder on the campus of the University of Iowa, The House was shot with a Canon EOS 7D digital camera (proudly namechecked in the end credits) and includes glimpses of numerous key locations from Ed Wood's life. Schoeppner took his camera to Gold Diggers on Santa Monica Blvd., the Yucca Flats apartment building, and even Peter Coe's apartment at 5635 Laurel Canyon Blvd., the site of Ed's premature death. Perhaps only Pla-Boy Liquor on Yucca St. is missing.

It's my guess that, by filming in black-and-white, Schoeppner intended his movie to be a companion piece to Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). Like the Burton film, The House relies heavily on Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) as source material. In fact, Schoeppner's film begins with a dramatization of a scene taken directly from Grey's book in which Ed Wood tries to talk a hospitalized Maila "Vampira" Nurmi (Sabra Jardine) into appearing nude in Necromania (1971). In Grey's book, Nurmi tells the story herself, including a line about Greta Garbo that ended up in Schoeppner's film.

Nurmi turns down "a hunnert apples."

Schoeppner takes this scene and transplants it to the year 1978. I should explain that, for dramatic purposes, The House takes various episodes from Ed Wood's life and condenses them down to a week or so, as if this is what Eddie was doing in the days just before he died. In a way, it's similar to Gus Van Sant's Last Days (2005), a fictional portrait of a rock musician pretty blatantly based on Kurt Cobain. But I was also reminded of Arthur Miller's 1949 stage play Death of a Salesman. In many ways, Eddie is as much a salesman as Willy Loman, and both men are shown spiraling (inexorably) into oblivion.

Scott Bray as Bela.

The more I think of it, the more The House That Ed Built reminds me of Death of a Salesman. Both Willy and Ed have mounting financial problems and desperately reach out to old acquaintances for help (which they don't get). In The House, Ed calls ex-girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Susan Denbow), now a successful songwriter, to get "completion funds" for a film he's making with Steve Apostolof. She shuts him down quickly, reminding Ed how he "betrayed" her with Loretta King (Olivia Benavides). If you weren't familiar with the story, you might incorrectly guess from this movie that Ed and Loretta had an affair. They did not. Ed's betrayal of Dolores was strictly of a professional nature.

As Willy Loman's mind deteriorates throughout Death of a Salesman, he begins flashing back to the past and confusing those flashbacks with his modern-day reality. A similar thing happens to Ed Wood throughout The House. All through the movie, we see brief visions of Eddie's past. In the Miller play, Willy is visited by the ghost of his opportunistic Uncle Ben. Something very similar happens in The House when Eddie is visited by the ghost of Bela Lugosi (Scott Bray, giving the film's best performance).

The final confrontation between Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi is the unquestioned highlight of The House That Ed Built, and it's an impressively well-acted, darkly funny, and well-staged scene. Poor Eddie is dying of heart failure in the back bedroom of Peter Coe's apartment when he suddenly has a vision of Bela looking exactly as he did in Glen or Glenda (1953). Schoeppner has gone as far as recreating the library set from that film and has done an admirable job of it. I especially like how, instead of a skeleton, he uses one of those jointed cardboard Halloween decorations. Also (and I don't know if this was intentional), one of the items on the shelf behind him looks very much like a sex toy.

The message Bela wants to convey to Eddie is that the latter has made his mark in showbiz and will be remembered for years after his death, so it's okay for him to cross over to the other side. Which Eddie, obviously, does. But here's the weird part: I started writing the first few paragraphs of this very article before I had actually watched The House That Ed Built all the way through, and a lot of the talking points I wanted to make are actually said out loud by Bela in the final scene of this movie! I'm not kidding. I actually had to rewrite the intro in order to avoid using lines from Shane Schoeppner's script!

With his trim physique, crisp diction, and tidy haircut, Schoeppner does not much resemble the toothless, bloated, scraggly-haired trainwreck that Ed Wood had become in 1978. In fact, the fellow we see in this movie looks like he could walk into a bank and secure a loan for his next picture. As such, it took me a while before I was able to accept this version of Ed as the real deal. But Schoeppner invests the character with real pathos, and I think it comes from the fact that, as an independent filmmaker trying to make movies by any means necessary, he can truly empathize with Ed Wood's plight. 

"There but for the grace of God..."