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.

7 into 28 is 13: The politics of joke thievery

Bud Abbott screws his landlord out of the rent money with mathematical trickery.

How do jokes get started? Hell if I know, but back in the days of vaudeville, certain successful comedic routines got passed around a lot between different acts, with very little thought given as to attribution. I guess there was a lot of borrowing or just outright stealing in those days. Maybe there were turf wars over the "ownership" of certain bits. These were live performances, of course, and no one was recording them, so what was the harm ultimately? But then a strange thing happened to the entertainment biz. Two strange things, actually: film and television. Suddenly, performances were being immortalized and shown to audiences from coast to coast. And yet, those same hand-me-down vaudeville routines kept popping up on screens both big and small well into the 1950s and beyond. Hey, the material has to come from somewhere. There's a famous quote sometimes attributed to Larry Gelbart and sometimes to Bob Hope: "When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in." Many decades later, a variation on that line wound up in a Family Guy episode: "Vaudeville's dead, and TV's the box they're gonna bury it in." So even the quote about vaudeville has some miles on it.

There is one routine in particular that shows up with remarkable persistence in old movies and TV shows, performed by a variety of comedians with very little variation in the basic premise or structure. Simply put, one character tries to convince another character that 28 divided by 7 is 13. The first character will "prove" this assertion in three ways: long division, multiplication, and addition. Always in that order. I guess the bit is most closely associated with Abbott and Costello, who went from vaudeville to film to television over the course of their long career. They certainly did this math routine a lot of times. Like this, for instance:

So Bud and Lou sure performed the hell out out of the "28" bit. But the routine was not their exclusive property by any stretch. Ron Ormond's 1951 film, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones is meant as a tribute to minstrel shows, which were already on their way out by then (for good reason). This is the movie from which Ed Wood's producers plundered the Cotton Watts and Chick routine he used in Jail Bait in 1954. Two of the other performers in the original Ormond film are Emmett Miller and Ches Davis, doing their version of the old "28" routine, though they don't get around to it until about two minutes into this clip.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main were doing this same routine in one of their low-budget Ma and Pa Kettle films at Universal. The only difference is that they use 25 and 14 instead of 28 and 13. But the joke is exactly the same, as is the order: division, then multiplication, then addition.

Remember all this before you ever accuse anyone of stealing a joke. Joke-stealing is a proud show business tradition. Comedy could barely exist without it. I mean, who came up with this mathematics routine? Abbott and Costello? Davis and Miller? Ma and Pa Kettle? Probably none of them!

This year's can't-miss gift: the abacus!

An abacus: get one of these babies now while they're still affordable!

Are you still puzzling over what to get people for Christmas this year? Well, puzzle no more, dear reader! I have the answer. Simply get everyone on your list an abacus.

"An aba-wha?" you might be saying right now. Relax. Let me explain.

An abacus is a simple yet ingenious calculating tool consisting of a frame and beads which slide on wires or dowels. Dating back to 2500 B.C., it is the precursor to the calculator and, thus, the computer. Think about that for a moment: the abacus is the original computer! Version 1.0. Compared to the abacus, the Commodore 64 is a newbie poseur. Although generally considered obsolete here in the West, the abacus is still crazy hot in Japan, where it's known as a soroban and is in common use by children whose math skills put most Americans to shame. There might be something to this. We're so used to letting machines do all our math for us these days that maybe we should have to physically move beads around to do simple addition and subtraction. We've gotten lazy, and our minds have turned to instant oatmeal as a result. Just watch this video to feel instantly humbled:

Insufferable people like this will soon be everywhere.

Congratulations, Einstein. You just got your ass handed to you by a 7-year-old girl. But that's not why I'm recommending the abacus as the ideal gift for 2012. Yeah, they're educational and help strengthen our brains, but screw all that. Instead, I'm recommending it because I have the sneaking suspicion that, within a year's time, abaci (that's the plural of abacus -- learn that word!) will be very trendy indeed and will be used by influential tastemakers around the world. Did you know that someone who uses an abacus is called an abacist? I think by this time in 2013, every would-be cool person you know will be bragging about being an abacist to the point that you'll be sick of hearing that word. People will be lugging abaci around with them the way people tote Kindles and iPhones today. Why do I say this? Just look at the evidence. The abacus has all the qualities necessary to achieve coolness. To wit:

• It's popular in Japan. And we know that's where all the cool, exotic shit comes from, right?
• It's ridiculously old school, and if there's one thing cool people like to do, it's using totally outmoded and impractical technology. Witness the resurgence of vinyl records and 8-bit video games. This just takes that idea to its ultimate extreme.
• It requires no batteries or electricity and is, therefore, environmentally conscious. Compared to this, the Prius might as well be a Humvee. Once you become an avid abacist, you can be all judgy and self-righteous around people who still use laptops and smartphones.
• The word "abacus" just sounds cool. Say it out loud a couple of times and hear for yourself. And if you know related words like "abaci" and "abacist," you'll instantly sound smarter than you actually are.
• Design-wise, the abacus is very sleek and minimalist. Abaci come in a variety of colors and styles. There is great potential here for customization. Imagine a shiny, blinged-out abacus with a gold frame, jewels for beads, and platinum wires. Or at the opposite end of the spectrum, picture a tasteful, all-white abacus with the Apple logo on it -- the perfect accessory for your regular Sunday trip to the bookstore or coffee shop.  Whatever your personal style, there's an abacus for you.

So there you have it, folks. You can get a very nice abacus for about ten or twenty bucks today. In my opinion, you'd better snap 'em up fast before some Portland barista gets wind of this and the price skyrockets. Don't say I didn't warn you.