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| There's no lonelier place in cinema. |
When filmmakers use the term "shooting ratio," they don't mean the aspect ratio of the movie they're making. Instead, they're talking about the amount of footage they shot versus the amount that actually wound up in the finished movie. For example, director George Miller shot 480 hours of footage for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which ended up running two hours when it finally hit theaters. That's a 240:1 shooting ratio, which is extreme even for a high-budget picture. To put that in perspective, the ratio for Francis Ford Coppola's notoriously troubled Apocalypse Now (1979) was 95:1. High but not Fury Road high.
What do you think Ed Wood's shooting ratios were? Well, we actually have some evidence to work with here. Ed's Take It Out in Trade (1970) runs about 80 minutes. Take It Out in Trade: The Outtakes (1995) runs about 69 minutes. Assuming every scrap of unused footage wound up in the outtake reel, that's 149 total minutes of film and a shooting ratio of 1.8:1. But let's be generous and round that up to 2:1. For projects like the Swedish Erotica loops, Ed's ratio was probably more like 1:1, meaning everything that was shot made the final cut.
Come to think of it, there's one more still-existent Ed Wood outtake reel that I know of: the one for his 1951 made-for-TV short, The Sun was Setting. The reel runs about seven minutes and change. The finished film itself is 13 and a half minutes. Altogether, that's 21 minutes of footage and a very economical 1.5:1 shooting ratio. Notice that, just like with the TIOIT outtakes, these are either alternate takes or little scraps from the beginnings and ends of scenes. There are no missing or deleted sequences visible here.
There's a reason we don't have a treasure trove of extra scenes from Ed Wood's movies: Eddie couldn't afford to film anything that wasn't going to be used in the final cut. Hell, he had to pad his movies with stock footage just to get them to feature length. Every scrap of celluloid was precious to him. If you wonder why Ed left so many bloopers in his movies—boom mics dipping into frame, actors flubbing lines, etc.—there's your answer. In a way, it lends an air of realism to his films, as acknowledged in this classic scene from Ed Wood (1994).