Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 226: Will Sloan's Ed Wood: Made In Hollywood USA (2025)

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.

A BFI book.

To my knowledge, however, there are no BFI books about Glen or Glenda (1953), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), or even Ed Wood (1994). What a rotten bit of luck. Those three films are the likeliest candidates for the series, and they've been shut out so far. (Hell, I keep hoping that Glenda will wind up in the Criterion Collection someday. Fingers crossed.)

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?