Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 271: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 4]

Young Eddie (Johnny Depp) carries a palm tree across the Universal backlot.

"He worked at Universal, and he never recovered."

That was the verdict of actor, raconteur, and noted fabulist John Andrews (1941-1991) on his friend and occasional employer, Edward D. Wood, Jr. The story is almost too perfect to be believed: Eddie grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY watching classic Universal productions like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) and then actually got to work for the studio when he moved to Hollywood as a young man. While there, he saw how Universal would provide whatever resources a director might need—like, say, piles of sand for an Abbott & Costello picture set in the desert. As a no-budget, no-frills independent filmmaker, Eddie often struggled to provide such niceties as sets and props for his own movies and would think back wistfully to his days at Universal.

I have never seen much evidence to document Ed Wood's time at Universal Studios. No time cards, paycheck stubs, contracts, employee IDs, or even photos of him on the backlot. In the documentary The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1996), actor Lyle Talbot recalls working with Eddie at Universal, but the film he mentions is Chinatown Squad (1935), which was made well before Eddie's time there. Lyle might be thinking of a completely different kid named Eddie. The only other remnants of Ed Wood's tenure at the studio are some vague anecdotes from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy:The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992). I've compiled all the relevant quotes from that book I could find:

Talking about Ed Wood's time at Universal in the early 1950s.

Even if it's not all true, you must admit it's interesting. Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski certainly thought so. They used Grey's book as the basis for their screenplay, Ed Wood (1994), so the Tim Burton-directed biopic includes a few scenes showing us a young Eddie (played by Johnny Depp) toiling at Universal and dreaming of making his own movies someday.

Carl Laemmle.

The first time we see Eddie at Universal in the biopic, he is sitting on a bench outside a large Quonset hut labeled "MAINTENANCE." It seems to be a storage facility with lots of plants outside. In the screenplay, Eddie is reading The Hollywood Reporter, but in the finished film, he is merely fanning himself. His midafternoon reverie is rudely interrupted by his ill-tempered, gravelly-voiced boss, Mr. Kravitz (Biff Yeager), who tells him to deliver a potted palm tree to "the executive building." The script specifies "the Carl Laemmle building," but the film avoids any mention of the legendary Universal exec (1867-1939) who ushered in the studio's legendary horror cycle. 

Even though the film does not positively identify Ed's workplace, there is a later scene in Ed Wood that makes it extremely clear which studio this is supposed to be. (We'll get to it in the future.)

We now witness Eddie schlep the palm tree across the busy Universal lot. This is the type of studio backlot we're used to seeing in movies about movies: the kind where lots of costumed extras are milling about, dressed for different productions. Tim Burton included a similar scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985). In Ed Wood, many of the background extras are dressed in spacesuits. This is possibly what gives Eddie the inspiration to make a sci-fi epic of his own. But what really stops our hero in his tracks, literally and figuratively, is when he sees the aforementioned desert production.

According to John Andrews, the film Eddie saw being made was Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950). This was shot at Universal in April and May of 1950, so that puts a timestamp on the scene in Ed Wood. Incidentally, the cast of Foreign Legion also includes future Wood repertory player Tor Johnson. In both Nightmare of Ecstasy and the Ed Wood screenplay, it is the sand that produces Eddie's amazed reaction. But in the finished film, Ed is impressed by the real camels. Either way, he is quickly hurried along by an angry security guard.

Ed has a vision.

Eddie then continues on his merry way to the executive building, but when he walks by the editing rooms, he is flagged down by an employee identified only as Old Crusty Man (Carmen Filpi). This elderly gentleman wants to show Eddie some "great new stuff." Eddie enters the darkened editing bay and watches in rapt attention as the old man shows him various stock shots: a buffalo stampede, an octopus, and some World War II battle footage. The editor says he's just going to file the footage and never use it again, but Eddie starts formulating a plot:

Ed: The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So the military are called in to solve the mystery. 

Old Man: You forgot the octopus. 

Ed: No, no, I'm saving that for my big underwater climax.

Ed Wood's movies are known for their heavy and often incongruous use of stock footage, a tradition that literally began with his earliest-known production, Range Revenge (1948). But we shouldn't judge him too harshly for this. I've watched a lot of low-budget sci-fi and horror films from this era and can say with confidence that Eddie was far from the worst offender in this category. I've sat through movies where (no exaggeration) half the runtime or more is devoted to grainy, second-hand footage of military planes or rocket launches. What sets Eddie aside is the strange, often surreal way he used stock footage, like the infamous buffalo stampede in Glen or Glenda (1953). I'm sure the above scene in Ed Wood was inspired by this quote from actor Carl Anthony:

Carl Anthony discusses Ed's use of stock footage.

If you've spent any time on the internet lately, you'll know that stock footage remains as popular as ever. (Where would YouTube be without it?) If Eddie were around today, he'd be buying cheap clips from Shutterstock and Pond5 to pad out his masterpieces. But back in those days, he was getting his material from stock footage libraries. It's unlikely that he had a secret stash at Universal or a kindly editor supplying him with "great new stuff." Still in all, this was a neat way of taking one of Eddie's signature traits as a filmmaker and incorporating it into his origin story.

When Eddie finally gets to the executive building, he encounters a pair of secretaries giggling over an article in Variety. He asks them what the article is about, and their answer changes the entire course of his life. But that's a whole other chapter of this story, so it will have to wait for the next installment in this series.