Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 142: Graphing Ed Wood

Ed Wood stares at the peaks and valleys of his debut film, Glen or Glenda.

This whole thing goes back to Michael Bey. (Don't worry. It eventually leads to Ed Wood.) Back in 2007, Michael's hit film Transformers, based on the 1980s Hasbro toy line, had cinephiles everywhere in an uproar. Was this loud, ugly, CGI-laden toy commercial the future of movies? And, if so, what kind of future was that? 

Was this the downfall of movies?

Film fanatics were especially appalled by Transformers' average shot length or ASL. That's the average amount of time that elapses between edits—cuts, fades, dissolves, etc. Michael Bey is known for his frantic, fast-paced style, so his Transformers movies have a very low ASL, somewhere around 3 to 4 seconds. Some of Bey's action sequences have an ASL of just 2.7 seconds. Bey wasn't the only director doing this—not even close—but he was the most prominent, so he became the poster child for directors with short attention spans.

This ASL controversy garnered a bit of attention at the time from Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote about it in his Sun-Times column. He, too, fretted about those ever-declining shot lengths and longed for the more leisurely-paced films of the past. I was a regular reader of Ebert's reviews and columns, so that's how the phenomenon came to my attention. I'm not sure I would have known about it otherwise, since I didn't attend a lot of big budget action blockbusters back then. (I still don't.)

Nevertheless, I was curious about this whole ASL phenomenon because it gave me a different perspective on movies and TV shows. In one of his articles, Roger Ebert mentioned a site called Cinemetrics, which housed a database of user-submitted ASL graphs for various movies. I was interested enough in this topic to submit a few graphs of my own using Cinemetrics' own handy measurement software. The software really does most of the work for you. All you do is watch the movie normally, while clicking every time there's an edit. The software completes the graphing and calculating when you're done.

Between August and September 2007, not long after the release of Transformers, I submitted nine different ASL graphs to Cinemetrics: two episodes of The Simpsons (I wanted to compare different eras of the show), a notorious Sid Davis "educational" short, and six feature films, one of which was Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953). I recently revisited Cinemetrics for the first time in years and found to my delight that those graphs are all still there! You can find them by going to the database page and searching for my last name, Blevins.

As for the Glen or Glenda graph I made over 15 years ago, what information does it yield? Hell if I know. I'm neither a filmmaker nor a statistician, so a lot of this is beyond my ken. I suppose I just wanted to see how Ed's movies were put together. Here's what I had to say about the editing of Glen or Glenda back in 2007:

A truly schizophrenic movie, editing-wise. Ed Wood alternates long takes with rapid-fire montages. There is a definite chasm between the scenes filmed with sound (lengthy static shots) and the scenes filmed silently (quick montages, often consisting of stock footage with post-dubbed narration). I must note here that this analysis is based on the Image DVD, which itself was made from a censored print of the film. Various small cuts, normally a phrase here or there, occur throughout the film. The censor clearly wanted to get rid of the word "sex" whenever possible. Whether this actually affects the number of shot changes, I do not know.

What's great about the Cinemetrics site is that you can customize the graph in a number of ways. For fun, try messing with the various settings, including "step," "degree of trendline," and "moving average range." Maybe, if you know filmmaking or statistics, these terms might even mean something to you. They don't mean much to me, I must confess. Anyway, here's how the Glenda graph looks at the sixth degree of the trendline.

A Cinemetrics ASL graph for Glen or Glenda.

I did find out that Glen or Glenda has a leisurely average shot length of 10.6 seconds. Ed's movies tend to be pretty sluggish, so this didn't surprise me. But I noticed there were three separate passages during which Glenda's ASL plunges precipitously. The first occurs about 11 minutes into the movie when Ed gives us a montage of stock shots and narration. ("If the creator wanted us to fly...") The second starts at about the 35-minute mark when Glen has a lengthy nightmare that ultimately evolves (or devolves) into a burlesque show. The third and final such passage occurs nearly an hour into the movie when Alan is transitioning into Ann. This, too, is presented as a rapid-fire montage.

Amazingly, I was not the only Cinemetrics user to graph an Ed Wood film! Back in 2008, a user named Hilary Mogul submitted a graph for Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Hilary found that the movie had an ASL of 7.8, nearly three seconds shorter than Glenda, so maybe Ed's movies were getting a little livelier as he went along. Here's how the Plan 9 graph looks:

A Cinemetrics ASL graph for Plan 9 from Outer Space.

I think you'll agree that the editing is much less, uh, idiosyncratic this time around. In terms of pacing, Plan 9 lacks the big ups and downs of Glenda. The only major dip in ASL occurs about 15 minutes into the movie. That's when we get the montage of flying saucer sightings, accompanied by Criswell's narration. You may notice that the pace picks up right near the end of the movie, too. That's when Jeff, Lt. Harper, and Col. Edwards confront Eros and Tanna in the spaceship. By Ed Wood's standards, this is a fast-paced action scene. Compare the Glenda graph to the Plan 9 graph, and you'll see that Glenda actually slackens the pace in its last few minutes!

In all, I was really heartened to know that the ASL graphs I had made back in 2007 were still available in 2023. Talk about a blast from the past! Back then, I didn't even have a blog, but it's clear that Ed Wood and his movies were on my mind already. What I really hope is that this article leads people to Cinemetrics, and they use the resources there to study Ed's movies (and other directors' movies) in a new way.

'Apartment 3-G' is going away, and we all need to feel bad about that.

A Sunday Apartment 3-G from the days when the strip was drawn by Alex Kotzky.

November 21, 2015 is fast approaching, citizens. The execution date of Apartment 3-G, the long-running soap opera strip, looms, and there is little we can do to stop it. After 54 years, a staple of the funny pages will be gone forever, mourned only by a dwindling handful of fans. Its executioners, the decision-makers at King Features Syndicate, probably consider this a mercy killing. A3G, once one of the best-drawn strips in the business, has been in alarming decline for at least a decade and a half, with the last year in particular being downright embarrassing. The strip's original writer, Nicholas P. Dallis, and original artist, Alex Kotzky, both died back in the '90s. The current creative team consists of writer Margaret Shulock, who also contributes to the humor strip Six Chix, and artist Frank Bolle, a comic book veteran who is now 91 years old and clearly no longer at the peak of his powers.

Sadly, I only caught up with Apartment 3-G during its waning years, and this was due to the strip's regular appearances on Josh Fruhlinger's satirical blog, The Comics Curmudgeon. By then, Dallis and Kotzky were both long gone, and the strip's characters had already devolved into inexpressive, mannequin-like automatons who stiffly interacted with each other in front of bland, interchangeable backdrops, complete with standard props that could pop up anywhere. Some fans even started nicknaming these all-purpose set decorations: "Drapey," "Lampy," etc.

A recent Apartment 3-G featuring Drapey and Lampy in the second panel.

And yet, aided by Fruhlinger's frequent and piquant commentary, I did find myself getting involved in the lives of A3G's lovelorn characters: three ambitious young women sharing an apartment in New York City. There was idealistic blonde teacher Lu Ann Powers, red-haired nurse Tommie Thompson, and, best of all, scheming, man-hungry Margo Magee, who has held any number of ill-defined jobs over the years, including talent agent and event planner. In the strip's heyday, these characters were modeled after, respectively, Tuesday Weld, Lucille Ball, and Joan Collins. Today they look -- and act -- more like the generic humanoids you'd find in a first aid pamphlet. The cast is rounded out by the gals' kindly neighbor, Professor Aristotle Papagoras, and a whole host of relatives, suitors, professional associates, and romantic rivals.

I won't kid you folks and say that  Apartment 3-G is one of the greatest comic strips of all time. It's not. In fact, in the last year, it has been allowed to lapse into near-total incoherence. The current, badly bungled storyline, in which Margo suddenly lapses into a coma only to recover almost instantly, may be what killed the strip off forever. It seemed that the only people reading A3G by then were those who were making fun of it. So King Features Syndicate pulled the plug. The long-running feature is not going out with a bang, nor even with a whimper. It's just going. There is some speculation that the strip will not even bother to tie up its existing plots or give its main characters a proper sendoff.

This feels all wrong. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, Apartment 3-G was once kind of magnificent. It was certainly a part of newspaper readers' lives for decades. And now it's unceremoniously being given the hook, like a bad Vaudeville act that's outstayed its welcome. That's almost too sad to contemplate. What the strip really needed was an all-new creative team who really cared about the characters and wanted to tell great stories about them. But that's not going to happen.

So farewell, Margo Magee. May you cause as much havoc in the next realm as you did in this one.