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| Jeffrey Jones in Ed Wood. Inset: Criswell in Night of the Ghouls. |
Ed Wood Wednesdays is, by far, the longest-running series in the history of this blog. It may be the most significant project of my entire life. I started it nearly 13 years ago, and it's nowhere near completion. But within that one big project, there have been a lot of smaller sub-projects, like my reviews of every story in Blood Splatters Quickly (2014) and my 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar. These have been some of the most enjoyable articles for me to write, so I'm always on the lookout for the next possible series-within-a-series. And now I think I've found it.
What I plan to do for the next however many weeks is go through Tim Burton's glossy biopic Ed Wood (1994) scene by scene and discuss how accurate—or inaccurate—it is, compared to the real life and career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). Before you get upset, please know that I am doing this purely as a tribute to the movie. I am not trying to criticize director Tim Burton or writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski for taking liberties with the facts. I'm completely fine with them taking liberties with the facts, and I love Ed Wood just the way it is. But this series will (hopefully) allow me to talk about numerous aspects of Eddie's real life and work in an entertaining way.
Oh, and I fully expect to be corrected and nitpicked along the way by you, the readers. If you feel I've made a misstatement, let me know and I'll update the article. Anyway, let's get started.
Where better to start than at the very beginning of the movie? 00:00:01. I must say, Ed Wood starts in spectacular fashion. Within seconds, we are introduced to three of the film's greatest assets: the production design of Tom Duffield, the cinematography of Stefan Czapsky, and the music of Howard Shore. In their own way, these artists are all trying to evoke 1950s Hollywood—not as it truly was, perhaps, but as we might imagine or wish it to be. This is a heightened, stylized evocation of a time and place. The score, for instance, heavily employs the theremin. That whirring electronic instrument is associated with 1950s science-fiction films, thanks to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing From Another World (1951), and Forbidden Planet (1956). But none of Eddie's actual 1950s movies used it at all.
The first shot in Ed Wood appears to be a scale model of the Old Willows Place from Bride of the Monster (1955). A side-by-side comparison shows that the biopic suggests the look of the original movie without copying it exactly. The script refers to it as a "haunted mansion." The art department did incredible work here. I especially like the gnarled tree branches in the foreground and the dismal dirt road in front of the house. The camera moves toward the front window, and we transition to a full-size living room or parlor set. The script calls it a "spooky shrouded parlor."
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| Two spooky houses: Ed Wood vs. Bride of the Monster. |
The design of the parlor is unique to this movie. There are a few elements, such as the fireplace on the left side of the screen, imported from Bride of the Monster. Otherwise, this is a newly-designed set. The main feature of the room is a stately oak coffin resting atop a bier. There is a large, dramatic window directly behind the coffin, through which we can see a cemetery. The coffin lid opens of its own accord, and a tuxedo-clad Criswell (played by now-disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones) sits up and addresses the camera directly.
The speech he makes ("Greetings, my friend..") comes almost word-for-word from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), but the device of having Criswell deliver it from a coffin comes from Night of the Ghouls (1959). Within less than a minute, then, Ed Wood has directly referenced three different real-life Wood movies. The screenplay has Cris' hand reaching out of the coffin first, a la Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), but in the finished movie, the coffin lid opens by itself, perhaps being controlled remotely by a crew member. In Night of the Ghouls, the first time we see Cris in the coffin, the lid is already open. And his coffin rests in a featureless black set, not the ornately-decorated parlor we see in Ed Wood. Also, in Ghouls, Criswell's hair is slightly disheveled, and the man himself appears to be hung over, while Jeffrey Jones is perfectly coiffed and alert.
Having completed his opening spiel, Criswell resumes a resting position in his coffin, and the camera pushes past him through the aforementioned window. We then transition to the remarkable main title sequence of Ed Wood, which merits this detailed breakdown by Kirsten Sales. Meanwhile, Mark Simonson has critiqued the use of vintage typography in Ed Wood, praising the fonts used during the opening credits but criticizing certain logos and headlines seen elsewhere in the movie as being too modern for a film set in the 1950s.
During the opening credits, the camera creeps through a forlorn graveyard where the names of several principal actors appear on tombstones. This is directly inspired by the opening credits of Plan 9. I like that the tombstones are completely flat, by the way. Very Woodian. As the names continue to appear onscreen, the camera submerges into a lake or pond, and the lettering appears distorted (another very nice touch). While underwater, we see some black-and-white stock footage of an octopus, a direct homage to Bride of the Monster. But then, the octopus reaches its tentacle out of the water, and we see some astonishing stop-motion footage of the fearsome appendage waving back and forth as a flying saucer zooms overhead. So we are back in Plan 9 territory.
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| Two space stations: Ed Wood (left) and Plan 9 (right). |
The flying saucer fires a lightning bolt at the octopus, and the creature's terrible, slimy limb becomes electrified before collapsing out of frame in defeat. Score one for the aliens! The flying saucer is soon joined by two more just like it. These UFOs are not exactly like the ones we see in Plan 9—the silhouette is different, less rounded—but they are close enough that the tribute/reference is obvious. The three ships make their way toward an orbiting satellite that is very similar to Space Station 7 from Plan 9, complete with the nipple-like bump on top.
The camera then pans down, down, down until we see a scale model of Hollywood as it looked in the early 1950s. It is a dark, rainy night, and the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign is only barely visible. In fact, the entire city is barely visible. But as the camera pulls further and further back, we get an occasional flash of lightning that illuminates all the buildings and streets. Among the landmarks to watch out for: the Fontenoy apartment complex (1811 North Whitley Avenue), the Hollywood Pacific Theatre aka Warner Theatre (6433 Hollywood Boulevard) with its two massive radio towers, and the Broadway Hollywood Building (1645 Vine Street). Eventually, the camera takes us to the small theater where Eddie (Johnny Depp) is staging The Casual Company.
At this point, we are about five minutes into Ed Wood, and we have already gotten marvelously detailed and lovingly rendered tributes to three of Eddie's best-known 1950s films. It's a tour de force of filmmaking and an elevated work of fanart all at once. Have I mentioned that this is all edited in such a way that it looks like one continuous shot? There's literally not a hard cut until about 5:07 when Eddie paces in front of the theater. I am not sure where this series will take me in future installments, but we are off to one heck of a start!
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