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| Author Will Sloan gives us his take on the man from Poughkeepsie. |
When I was younger, one of my favorite things to do on a slow Sunday afternoon was go to the mall bookstore and browse through the BFI Film Classics series. Have you seen these? If you've ever been to a Barnes & Noble (or somewhere similar), you probably have. They're little pocket-sized guidebooks, each one about a different movie and each written by a different author. They're basically photo-illustrated essays about classic films. One of them, for instance, is Salman Rushdie's take on The Wizard of Oz (1939). Another is Camille Paglia's interpretation of The Birds (1963). There are dozens more, and the BFI is still making them.
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| A BFI book. |
Until such time as the British Film Institute gets its act together, we can enjoy Will Sloan's Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA (2025). Sloan is an author of no small reputation. You may know him from his podcasts, Michael and Us and The Important Cinema Club. My introduction to him was the recent two-disc Gold Ninja Video edition of Ed Wood's Revenge of the Dead (1959). which he cohosts with Justin Decloux. He's contributed material to The New Yorker and NPR and has already authored a few pop culture books, including The Journey of Stoogeological Studies (2023). This guy covers the waterfront, so to speak. And now, he has finally produced an entire volume about the career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. that feels similar in spirit to those BFI books.
So is Made in Hollywood USA a biography of Wood, like Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), or is it a sweeping critical reappraisal of his work, like Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009)? I'd say it's both, but it leans heavily in the direction of the latter. In Wood's case, it is impossible and inadvisable to separate the art from the artist. What makes Wood's films and books so interesting, in fact, is how Eddie's own views and experiences inform his work. When you watch Plan 9 or Glenda, you cannot help but wonder what kind of person would have conceived of such a thing. These strange, misshapen movies did not grow on trees; they came from somewhere. But where?
That's what this book aims to find out. Sloan spells out his mission in the book's introduction:
My goal with this monograph is to take [Ed Wood] seriously as an artist and give his work a fair and thorough analysis on those terms. I believe he is entitled to the kind of thoroughgoing critical study that a serious artist deserves. But while taking him seriously, I also hope to not get too serious about him.Ed Wood's films have clearly held a fascination for Will Sloan for many years, and I believe Made in Hollywood USA is the author's 150-page attempt to pinpoint exactly why that is. After all, Eddie was hardly the only director making low-budget exploitation films in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. There were dozens of these guys with career arcs vaguely similar to his. What makes Ed's films so special compared to theirs?
To answer that, the book provides us thoughtful analyses of Glenda and Plan 9 as well as Jail Bait (1954) and Bride of the Monster (1955), plus shorter sections covering Crossroad Avenger (1953), The Violent Years (1956), Final Curtain (1957), The Bride and the Beast (1958), Night of the Ghouls (1959), Take It Out in Trade (1970), Necromania (1971), The Only House in Town (1971), and The Young Marrieds (1972). I was especially pleased that Jail Bait and The Only House were not given short shrift, as these films are perhaps not as well-known or widely-screened as some other titles in the Wood canon. Some of the best passages in Made in Hollywood USA, at least from my perspective, deal specifically with Jail Bait and what makes that film such a compelling, queasy, and disorienting watch.
As other authors before Sloan have no doubt discovered, the Wood filmography can become downright unwieldy when you choose to cover the films he wrote and/or produced but did not actually direct himself. Wood's career is like a hornet's nest; you take a whack at it, and lots of little insects come flying out at you. Happily, Sloan does not skip over the numerous films Eddie made in collaboration with directors Joe Robertson and Steve Apostolof. The posthumous Wood tribute films, including I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1999) and Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) are given serious consideration here as well, since these have played a significant role in shaping Ed Wood's legacy. Sloan even dips a toe into the apocrypha, mulling over the authenticity of such disputed titles as Bloomer Girl (1972) and Meatcleaver Massacre (1977).
Given the relatively brief length of this book, it's actually surprising how much material Sloan covers in Made in Hollywood USA. In addition to the chapters about Wood's movies, there is knowledgeable commentary on several of Wood's novels and how they reflect their author's career-long obsessions, fetishes, and fixations. Meanwhile, you can't discuss Wood's career without delving into the director's professional and personal association with screen legend Bela Lugosi, so Sloan does that, too. And then there is the matter of the so-called "Wood cult," i.e. the ironic fandom that has arisen around Ed Wood and the alleged "badness" of his work. Sloan does not shy away from this topic either, and he even weighs in on the ethics of MST3K and The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), both of which remain controversial in the cult movie world.
The passages in Made in Hollywood USA that truly surprised me are the ones comparing Ed Wood to other eccentric directors often labeled "the worst" ever to practice their craft. Some names I already knew well: Phil Tucker, James Nguyen, David DeCoteau, Coleman Francis, Tommy Wiseau, Uwe Boll, etc. (Had I forgotten that Wood and Tucker were rivals or had I never known that in the first place?) But, like I said before, Will Sloan covers the waterfront. He knows about directors who were nowhere near my field of vision, including New Jersey auteur Frank D'Angelo and Ugandan filmmaker Nabwana I.G.G. If nothing else, Made in Hollywood USA will give you several suggestions for your next movie night if you're looking for something out of the ordinary.
Above all, Will Sloan's Made in Hollywood USA is a reflection on what constitutes so-called "bad" art and what that says about our standards as a society. We tend to demand uniformity, professionalism, and evenness in the media we consume. When something sticks out, we want to hammer it flat. I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, Ed Wood's status as the supposed "worst" director of all time brought his work to a larger audience than it ever would have reached otherwise. On the other hand, after more than a decade of writing this column, words like "good" and "bad" have come to mean very little to me. When people ask me if Ed Wood's movies are "so bad they're good," I generally don't know how to respond. From now on, though, I think I'll point them in the direction of this book, since Will Sloan addresses the issue as eloquently as anyone ever has.